Juru: Legal Brazilian Large Language Model from Reputable Sources

The high computational cost associated with pretraining large language models limits their research. Two strategies have emerged to address this issue: domain specialization and pretraining with high-quality data. To explore these strategies, we specialized the Sabiá-2 Small model with 1.9 billion unique tokens from reputable Brazilian legal sources and conducted few-shot evaluations on legal and general knowledge exams. Our model, Juru, demonstrates the benefits of domain specialization with a reduced amount of pretraining data. However, this specialization comes at the expense of degrading performance in other knowledge areas within the same language. This study contributes to the growing body of scientific evidence showing that pretraining data selection may enhance the performance of large language models, enabling the exploration of these models at a lower cost.