diff --git a/src/axolotl/utils/data.py b/src/axolotl/utils/data.py
index 5c41d16fe..bca21076e 100644
--- a/src/axolotl/utils/data.py
+++ b/src/axolotl/utils/data.py
@@ -698,6 +698,24 @@ def get_dataset_wrapper(
     return dataset_wrapper, dataset_prompter
 
 
+def encode_packed_pretraining(
+    tokenizer: PreTrainedTokenizerBase, max_tokens: int, examples: List[str]
+):
+    # tokenize all the examples
+    # rows get split with stride (overlap)
+    res = tokenizer(
+        examples,
+        truncation=True,
+        max_length=max_tokens,
+        add_special_tokens=True,
+        return_overflowing_tokens=True,
+        stride=256,
+    )
+    # convert to a dataset.from_list
+    # use a dataloader and multipack batch sampler to pack the data
+    pass
+
+
 def encode_pretraining(
     tokenizer: PreTrainedTokenizerBase, max_tokens: int, examples: List[str]
 ) -> Dict[str, List]:
@@ -813,6 +831,7 @@ def load_pretraining_dataset(path, tokenizer, max_tokens=2048, seed=42):
     dataset = dataset.map(
         encode,
         batched=True,
+        batch_size=10_000,
         input_columns="text",
         # remove all the existing columns after mapping since they end up having
         # a different length than the encoded/tokenized column