Allal L. The Smol Training Playbook. The Secrets..Building World-Class LLMs 2025

Textbook in PDF format

Table of Contents
Introduction
Training compass: why → what → how
Every big model starts with a small ablation
Designing the model architecture
The art of data curation
The training marathon
Beyond base models — post-training in 2025
Infrastructure - the unsung hero
Conclusion
References