epoch

Definition

Plain language

One full pass through a dataset during training.

Also called: epochs

Why it matters: It's a natural unit for scheduling training events like learning-rate drops, checkpointing, and consolidation steps, and it's a quick proxy for how much the model has seen.

For example, if you train on a million examples and finish looking at every one of them once, you've completed one epoch.

Heard on the show

“You run the search in chunks they call epochs.”

Mentioned in 7 episodes

1. 178
   How an AI Reviewer Learned to Stop Going Easy on AI Writing
2. 156
   Why More Human Demonstrations Made a Computer-Use Agent Worse
3. 085
   Why Long-Context Models Might Need Compute, Not Capacity, Before Eviction
4. 078
   Training a Markdown File: When LLM Self-Improvement Borrows the Discipline of Neural Net Training
5. 059
   Firefly's Inversion: Building Verified Tool-Call Training Data by Working Backward
6. 054
   When Models Learn the Monitor Exists, the Reasoning Trace Stops Being a Window
7. 026
   What RL Actually Does to Language Models, at the Token Level

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