BTLM-3B-8K: 7B Parameter Performance in a 3B Parameter Model
Authors: name: Nolan Dey; name: Daria Soboleva; name: Faisal Al-Khateeb; name: Bowen Yang; name: Ribhu Pathria; name: Hemant Khachane; name: Shaheer Muhammad; name: Zhiming; name: Chen; name: Robert Myers; name: Jacob Robert Steeves; name: Natalia Vassilieva; name: Marvin Tom; name: Joel Hestness
Published: 2023-09-20 18:12:56

Abstract: We introduce the Bittensor Language Model, called "BTLM-3B-8K", a new
state-of-the-art 3 billion parameter open-source language model. BTLM-3B-8K was
trained on 627B tokens from the SlimPajama dataset with a mixture of 2,048 and
8,192 context lengths. BTLM-3B-8K outperforms all existing 3B parameter models
by 2-5.5% across downstream tasks. BTLM-3B-8K is even competitive with some 7B
parameter models. Additionally, BTLM-3B-8K provides excellent long context
performance, outperforming MPT-7B-8K and XGen-7B-8K on tasks up to 8,192
context length. We trained the model on a cleaned and deduplicated SlimPajama
dataset; aggressively tuned the \textmu P hyperparameters and schedule; used
ALiBi position embeddings; and adopted the SwiGLU nonlinearity.
  On Hugging Face, the most popular models have 7B parameters, indicating that
users prefer the quality-size ratio of 7B models. Compacting the 7B parameter
model to one with 3B parameters, with little performance impact, is an
important milestone. BTLM-3B-8K needs only 3GB of memory with 4-bit precision
and takes 2.5x less inference compute than 7B models, helping to open up access
to a powerful language model on mobile and edge devices. BTLM-3B-8K is
available under an Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face:
https://huggingface.co/cerebras/btlm-3b-8k-base.