Pre-training under infinite compute

Since compute grows much faster than web text available for language model pre-training, we ask how one should approach pre-training under fixed data and no compute constraints. We first show that existing data-constrained approaches of increasing epoch count and parameter count overfit, and we improve upon such recipes by tuning regularization, finding that the optimal weight decay is $30\times$ larger than standard practice. Since our regularized recipe monotonically decreases loss following a power law in parameter count, we estimate its best possible performance via the \textbf{asymptote} of its scaling law rather than the performance at a fixed compute budget. We then identify that ensembling independently trained models achieves a significantly lower loss asymptote than the regularized recipe. Our best intervention combining epoching, regularization, parameter scaling, and ensemble scaling achieves an asymptote at 200M tokens using $5.17\times$ less data than our baseline, and our data scaling laws predict that this improvement persists at higher token budgets. We find that our data efficiency gains can be realized at smaller parameter counts as we can distill an ensemble into a student model that is 8$\times$ smaller and retains $83$% of the ensembling benefit. Finally, our interventions designed for validation loss generalize to downstream benchmarks, achieving a $9$% improvement for pre-training evals. Our results show that simple algorithmic improvements can enable significantly more data-efficient pre-training in a compute-rich future.