How Optimizing Remaining Pretraining Loss Leads to Intelligence

lambdaviking · x · 2026-08-05

During a discussion regarding Gwern's views, a researcher shared insights into why pretraining works. The essay suggests that optimizing down the remaining parts of the loss during pretraining is what ultimately leads to the emergence of intelligence in large models.

Related event: Revisiting Gwern's Scaling Hypothesis: Does Lowering Pretraining Loss Lead to AGI?(5 posts)→

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