In 2019, GPT-2 1.5B was trained on ~10B tokens.
Last week Hugging Face released SmolLM v2 1.7B trained on 11T tokens, 3 orders of magnitude more training data for the same number of tokens with almost the same architecture.
So even back in 2019 we can say we were working with a tiny amount of data compared to what is routine now.
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