Zyda: A 1.3T Dataset for Open Language Modeling

The size of large language models (LLMs) has scaled dramatically in recent years and their computational and data requirements have surged correspondingly. State-of-the-art language models, even at relatively smaller sizes, typically require training on at least a trillion tokens. This rapid advancement has eclipsed the growth of open-source datasets available for large-scale LLM pretraining. In this paper, we introduce Zyda (Zyphra Dataset), a dataset under a permissive license comprising 1.3 trillion tokens, assembled by integrating several major respected open-source datasets into a single, high-quality corpus. We apply rigorous filtering and deduplication processes, both within and across datasets, to maintain and enhance the quality derived from the original datasets. Our evaluations show that Zyda not only competes favorably with other open datasets like Dolma, FineWeb, and RefinedWeb, but also substantially improves the performance of comparable models from the Pythia suite. Our rigorous data processing methods significantly enhance Zyda's effectiveness, outperforming even the best of its constituent datasets when used independently.

Zamba: A Compact 7B SSM Hybrid Model

In this technical report, we present Zamba, a novel 7B SSM-transformer hybrid model which achieves competitive performance against leading open-weight models at a comparable scale. Zamba is trained on 1T tokens from openly available datasets and is the best non-transformer model at this scale. Zamba pioneers a unique architecture combining a Mamba backbone with a single shared attention module, thus obtaining the benefits of attention at minimal parameter cost. Due to its architecture, Zamba is significantly faster at inference than comparable transformer models and requires substantially less memory for generation of long sequences. Zamba is pretrained in two phases: the first phase is based on existing web datasets, while the second one consists of annealing the model over high-quality instruct and synthetic datasets, and is characterized by a rapid learning rate decay. We open-source the weights and all checkpoints for Zamba, through both phase 1 and annealing phases.