readme: add initial version

README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+---
+language: de
+widget:
+- text: "Heute ist sehr schönes Wetter in"
+license: mit
+---
+
+# German GPT-2 model
+In this repository we release (yet another) GPT-2 model, that was trained on ~100 GB from the ["German colossal, clean Common Crawl corpus" ](https://german-nlp-group.github.io/projects/gc4-corpus.html).
+
+The model is meant to be an entry point for fine-tuning on other texts, and it is definitely not as good or "dangerous" as the English GPT-3 model. We do not plan extensive PR or staged releases for this model 😉
+
+---
+
+**Disclaimer**: the presented and trained language models in this repository are for **research only** purposes.
+The GC4 corpus - that was used for training - contains crawled texts from the internet. Thus, this GPT-2 model can
+be considered as highly biased, resulting in a model that encodes stereotypical associations along gender, race,
+ethnicity and disability status. Before using and working with the released checkpoints, it is highly recommended
+to read:
+
+[On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?](https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/Stochastic_Parrots.pdf)
+
+from Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major and Shmargaret Shmitchell.
+
+The aim of this released GPT-2 model for German is to boost research on (large) pre-trained language models for German, especially
+for identifying biases and how to prevent them, as most research is currently done for English only.
+
+---
+
+
+# Changelog
+
+06.09.2021: Initial release. Detailed information about training parameters follow soon.