Install from source:

git clone https://github.com/Lightning-AI/litgpt
cd litgpt
# if using uv
uv sync --all-extras
# if using pip
pip install -e ".[extra,compiler,test]"

All models

Tip: You can list all available models by running the litgpt download list command.

Test the server in a separate terminal and integrate the model API into your AI product:

# 3) Use the server (in a separate Python session)
import requests, json
response = requests.post(
    "http://127.0.0.1:8000/predict",
    json={"prompt": "Fix typos in the following sentence: Example input"}
)
print(response.json()["output"])

# 1) List all supported LLMs
litgpt download list

# 2) Use a model (auto downloads weights)
litgpt chat microsoft/phi-2

>> Prompt: What do Llamas eat?

The download of certain models requires an additional access token. You can read more about this in the download documentation.

mkdir -p custom_texts
curl https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24440/pg24440.txt --output custom_texts/book1.txt
curl https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26393/pg26393.txt --output custom_texts/book2.txt

# 1) Download a tokenizer
litgpt download EleutherAI/pythia-160m \
  --tokenizer_only True

# 2) Pretrain the model
litgpt pretrain EleutherAI/pythia-160m \
  --tokenizer_dir EleutherAI/pythia-160m \
  --data TextFiles \
  --data.train_data_path "custom_texts/" \
  --train.max_tokens 10_000_000 \
  --out_dir out/custom-model

# 3) Test the model
litgpt chat out/custom-model/final

mkdir -p custom_texts
curl https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24440/pg24440.txt --output custom_texts/book1.txt
curl https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26393/pg26393.txt --output custom_texts/book2.txt

# 1) Continue pretraining a model (auto downloads weights)
litgpt pretrain EleutherAI/pythia-160m \
  --tokenizer_dir EleutherAI/pythia-160m \
  --initial_checkpoint_dir EleutherAI/pythia-160m \
  --data TextFiles \
  --data.train_data_path "custom_texts/" \
  --train.max_tokens 10_000_000 \
  --out_dir out/custom-model

# 2) Test the model
litgpt chat out/custom-model/final

Configs let you customize training for all granular parameters like:

# The path to the base model's checkpoint directory to load for finetuning. (type: <class 'Path'>, default: checkpoints/stabilityai/stablelm-base-alpha-3b)
checkpoint_dir: checkpoints/meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-hf

# Directory in which to save checkpoints and logs. (type: <class 'Path'>, default: out/lora)
out_dir: out/finetune/qlora-llama2-7b

# The precision to use for finetuning. Possible choices: "bf16-true", "bf16-mixed", "32-true". (type: Optional[str], default: null)
precision: bf16-true

...

# The path to the base model's checkpoint directory to load for finetuning. (type: <class 'Path'>, default: checkpoints/stabilityai/stablelm-base-alpha-3b)
checkpoint_dir: checkpoints/meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-hf

# Directory in which to save checkpoints and logs. (type: <class 'Path'>, default: out/lora)
out_dir: out/finetune/qlora-llama2-7b

# The precision to use for finetuning. Possible choices: "bf16-true", "bf16-mixed", "32-true". (type: Optional[str], default: null)
precision: bf16-true

# If set, quantize the model with this algorithm. See ``tutorials/quantize.md`` for more information. (type: Optional[Literal['nf4', 'nf4-dq', 'fp4', 'fp4-dq', 'int8-training']], default: null)
quantize: bnb.nf4

# How many devices/GPUs to use. (type: Union[int, str], default: 1)
devices: 1

# How many nodes to use. (type: int, default: 1)
num_nodes: 1

# The LoRA rank. (type: int, default: 8)
lora_r: 32

# The LoRA alpha. (type: int, default: 16)
lora_alpha: 16

# The LoRA dropout value. (type: float, default: 0.05)
lora_dropout: 0.05

# Whether to apply LoRA to the query weights in attention. (type: bool, default: True)
lora_query: true

# Whether to apply LoRA to the key weights in attention. (type: bool, default: False)
lora_key: false

# Whether to apply LoRA to the value weights in attention. (type: bool, default: True)
lora_value: true

# Whether to apply LoRA to the output projection in the attention block. (type: bool, default: False)
lora_projection: false

# Whether to apply LoRA to the weights of the MLP in the attention block. (type: bool, default: False)
lora_mlp: false

# Whether to apply LoRA to output head in GPT. (type: bool, default: False)
lora_head: false

# Data-related arguments. If not provided, the default is ``litgpt.data.Alpaca``.
data:
  class_path: litgpt.data.Alpaca2k
  init_args:
    mask_prompt: false
    val_split_fraction: 0.05
    prompt_style: alpaca
    ignore_index: -100
    seed: 42
    num_workers: 4
    download_dir: data/alpaca2k

# Training-related arguments. See ``litgpt.args.TrainArgs`` for details
train:

  # Number of optimizer steps between saving checkpoints (type: Optional[int], default: 1000)
  save_interval: 200

  # Number of iterations between logging calls (type: int, default: 1)
  log_interval: 1

  # Number of samples between optimizer steps across data-parallel ranks (type: int, default: 128)
  global_batch_size: 8

  # Number of samples per data-parallel rank (type: int, default: 4)
  micro_batch_size: 2

  # Number of iterations with learning rate warmup active (type: int, default: 100)
  lr_warmup_steps: 10

  # Number of epochs to train on (type: Optional[int], default: 5)
  epochs: 4

  # Total number of tokens to train on (type: Optional[int], default: null)
  max_tokens:

  # Limits the number of optimizer steps to run (type: Optional[int], default: null)
  max_steps:

  # Limits the length of samples (type: Optional[int], default: null)
  max_seq_length: 512

  # Whether to tie the embedding weights with the language modeling head weights (type: Optional[bool], default: null)
  tie_embeddings:

  #   (type: float, default: 0.0003)
  learning_rate: 0.0002

  #   (type: float, default: 0.02)
  weight_decay: 0.0

  #   (type: float, default: 0.9)
  beta1: 0.9

  #   (type: float, default: 0.95)
  beta2: 0.95

  #   (type: Optional[float], default: null)
  max_norm:

  #   (type: float, default: 6e-05)
  min_lr: 6.0e-05

# Evaluation-related arguments. See ``litgpt.args.EvalArgs`` for details
eval:

  # Number of optimizer steps between evaluation calls (type: int, default: 100)
  interval: 100

  # Number of tokens to generate (type: Optional[int], default: 100)
  max_new_tokens: 100

  # Number of iterations (type: int, default: 100)
  max_iters: 100

# The name of the logger to send metrics to. (type: Literal['wandb', 'tensorboard', 'csv'], default: csv)
logger_name: csv

# The random seed to use for reproducibility. (type: int, default: 1337)
seed: 1337

litgpt finetune \
  --config https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Lightning-AI/litgpt/main/config_hub/finetune/llama-2-7b/lora.yaml \
  --lora_r 4

The Samba project by researchers at Microsoft is built on top of the LitGPT code base and combines state space models with sliding window attention, which outperforms pure state space models.

The LitGPT repository was the official starter kit for the NeurIPS 2023 LLM Efficiency Challenge, which is a competition focused on finetuning an existing non-instruction tuned LLM for 24 hours on a single GPU.

LitGPT powered the TinyLlama project and TinyLlama: An Open-Source Small Language Model research paper.

MicroLlama is a 300M Llama model pretrained on 50B tokens powered by TinyLlama and LitGPT.

The research paper "Pre-training Small Base LMs with Fewer Tokens", which utilizes LitGPT, develops smaller base language models by inheriting a few transformer blocks from larger models and training on a tiny fraction of the data used by the larger models. It demonstrates that these smaller models can perform comparably to larger models despite using significantly less training data and resources.