Time-Incremental Continued Pretraining of LLMs: Knowledge Updates Without Catastrophic Forgetting
Large language models (LLMs) drift out of date the moment their pretraining ends, yet retraining from scratch is prohibitively expensive. Continued pretraining (CPT) is the natural remedy, but it is typically evaluated through a continual learning lens that assumes disjoint data streams. This is a poor fit for time-incremental updates on web-scale crawls, where successive snapshots share substantial URL overlap by design. We study time-incremental CPT in this realistic regime: continued pretraining on FineWeb-Edu dumps drawn strictly from after each model's knowledge cutoff, evaluated across six open-weight models spanning three families (OLMo2, Llama-3.1/3.2, Gemma-3-1B) and four parameter scales (1B-3B-7B-8B). We organize our findings around four practical questions. (i) Is knowledge acquired? Yes, but heterogeneously, and without catastrophic forgetting: five of six models also improve on pre-cutoff factual recall, and the gains track pretraining saturation (driven primarily by token budget per parameter). (ii) What does it cost? Almost nothing: the macro-average across a thirteen-task suite stays within 0.01 of the base for every model. (iii) What is the recipe? Data quality dominates quantity (a curated 6B-token slice matches a broader 40B one); the optima for knowledge acquisition and general capability are separated by roughly an order of magnitude in learning rate; and LoRA at sufficient rank matches full CPT. (iv) Does it survive deployment? CPT gains transfer through SFT, while DPO's effect is family-dependent. Together, these results paint a more optimistic picture of time-incremental CPT than the prior continual learning literature suggests.