Bitsandbytes documentation

bitsandbytes

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bitsandbytes

The bitsandbytes library is a lightweight Python wrapper around CUDA custom functions, in particular 8-bit optimizers, matrix multiplication (LLM.int8()), and 8 + 4-bit quantization functions.

The library includes quantization primitives for 8-bit & 4-bit operations, through bitsandbytes.nn.Linear8bitLt and bitsandbytes.nn.Linear4bit and 8bit optimizers through bitsandbytes.optim module.

There are ongoing efforts to support further hardware backends, i.e. Intel CPU + GPU, AMD GPU, Apple Silicon. Windows support is on its way as well.

API documentation

License

The majority of bitsandbytes is licensed under MIT, however portions of the project are available under separate license terms, as the parts adapted from Pytorch are licensed under the BSD license.

We thank Fabio Cannizzo for his work on FastBinarySearch which we use for CPU quantization.