---
language:
- en
tags:
- pytorch
- causal-lm
- pythia
- pythia_v0
license: apache-2.0
datasets:
- the_pile
---
The *Pythia Scaling Suite* is a collection of models developed to facilitate
interpretability research. It contains two sets of eight models of sizes
70M, 160M, 410M, 1B, 1.4B, 2.8B, 6.9B, and 12B. For each size, there are two
models: one trained on the Pile, and one trained on the Pile after the dataset
has been globally deduplicated. All 8 model sizes are trained on the exact
same data, in the exact same order. All Pythia models are available
[on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co./models?other=pythia).
The Pythia model suite was deliberately designed to promote scientific
research on large language models, especially interpretability research.
Despite not centering downstream performance as a design goal, we find the
models match or exceed the performance of
similar and same-sized models, such as those in the OPT and GPT-Neo suites.
Please note that all models in the *Pythia* suite were renamed in January
2023. For clarity, a table
comparing the old and new names is provided in this model card, together
with exact parameter counts.
## Pythia-70M
### Model Details
- Developed by: [EleutherAI](http://eleuther.ai)
- Model type: Transformer-based Language Model
- Language: English
- Learn more: [Pythia's GitHub repository](https://github.com/EleutherAI/pythia)
for training procedure, config files, and details on how to use.
- Library: [GPT-NeoX](https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neox)
- License: Apache 2.0
- Contact: to ask questions about this model, join the [EleutherAI
Discord](https://discord.gg/zBGx3azzUn), and post them in `#release-discussion`.
Please read the existing *Pythia* documentation before asking about it in the
EleutherAI Discord. For general correspondence: [contact@eleuther.
ai](mailto:contact@eleuther.ai).
### Uses and Limitations
#### Intended Use
The primary intended use of Pythia is research on the behavior, functionality,
and limitations of large language models. This suite is intended to provide
a controlled setting for performing scientific experiments. To enable the
study of how language models change over the course of training, we provide
143 evenly spaced intermediate checkpoints per model. These checkpoints are
hosted on Hugging Face as branches. Note that branch `143000` corresponds
exactly to the model checkpoint on the `main` branch of each model.
You may also further fine-tune and adapt Pythia-70M for deployment,
as long as your use is in accordance with the Apache 2.0 license. Pythia
models work with the Hugging Face [Transformers
Library](https://huggingface.co./docs/transformers/index). If you decide to use
pre-trained Pythia-70M as a basis for your fine-tuned model, please
conduct your own risk and bias assessment.
#### Out-of-scope use
The Pythia Suite is **not** intended for deployment. It is not a in itself
a product and cannot be used for human-facing interactions.
Pythia models are English-language only, and are not suitable for translation
or generating text in other languages.
Pythia-70M has not been fine-tuned for downstream contexts in which
language models are commonly deployed, such as writing genre prose,
or commercial chatbots. This means Pythia-70M will **not**
respond to a given prompt the way a product like ChatGPT does. This is because,
unlike this model, ChatGPT was fine-tuned using methods such as Reinforcement
Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to better “understand” human instructions.
#### Limitations and biases
The core functionality of a large language model is to take a string of text
and predict the next token. The token deemed statistically most likely by the
model need not produce the most “accurate” text. Never rely on
Pythia-70M to produce factually accurate output.
This model was trained on [the Pile](https://pile.eleuther.ai/), a dataset
known to contain profanity and texts that are lewd or otherwise offensive.
See [Section 6 of the Pile paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027) for a
discussion of documented biases with regards to gender, religion, and race.
Pythia-70M may produce socially unacceptable or undesirable text, *even if*
the prompt itself does not include anything explicitly offensive.
If you plan on using text generated through, for example, the Hosted Inference
API, we recommend having a human curate the outputs of this language model
before presenting it to other people. Please inform your audience that the
text was generated by Pythia-70M.
### Quickstart
Pythia models can be loaded and used via the following code, demonstrated here
for the third `pythia-70m-deduped` checkpoint:
```python
from transformers import GPTNeoXForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
model = GPTNeoXForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
"EleutherAI/pythia-70m-deduped",
revision="step3000",
cache_dir="./pythia-70m-deduped/step3000",
)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(
"EleutherAI/pythia-70m-deduped",
revision="step3000",
cache_dir="./pythia-70m-deduped/step3000",
)
inputs = tokenizer("Hello, I am", return_tensors="pt")
tokens = model.generate(**inputs)
tokenizer.decode(tokens[0])
```
Revision/branch `step143000` corresponds exactly to the model checkpoint on
the `main` branch of each model.
For more information on how to use all Pythia models, see [documentation on
GitHub](https://github.com/EleutherAI/pythia).
### Training
#### Training data
[The Pile](https://pile.eleuther.ai/) is a 825GiB general-purpose dataset in
English. It was created by EleutherAI specifically for training large language
models. It contains texts from 22 diverse sources, roughly broken down into
five categories: academic writing (e.g. arXiv), internet (e.g. CommonCrawl),
prose (e.g. Project Gutenberg), dialogue (e.g. YouTube subtitles), and
miscellaneous (e.g. GitHub, Enron Emails). See [the Pile
paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027) for a breakdown of all data sources,
methodology, and a discussion of ethical implications. Consult [the
datasheet](https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.07311) for more detailed documentation
about the Pile and its component datasets. The Pile can be downloaded from
the [official website](https://pile.eleuther.ai/), or from a [community
mirror](https://the-eye.eu/public/AI/pile/).
The Pile was **not** deduplicated before being used to train Pythia-70M.
#### Training procedure
All models were trained on the exact same data, in the exact same order. Each
model saw 299,892,736,000 tokens during training, and 143 checkpoints for each
model are saved every 2,097,152,000 tokens, spaced evenly throughout training.
This corresponds to training for just under 1 epoch on the Pile for
non-deduplicated models, and about 1.5 epochs on the deduplicated Pile.
All *Pythia* models trained for the equivalent of 143000 steps at a batch size
of 2,097,152 tokens. Two batch sizes were used: 2M and 4M. Models with a batch
size of 4M tokens listed were originally trained for 71500 steps instead, with
checkpoints every 500 steps. The checkpoints on Hugging Face are renamed for
consistency with all 2M batch models, so `step1000` is the first checkpoint
for `pythia-1.4b` that was saved (corresponding to step 500 in training), and
`step1000` is likewise the first `pythia-6.9b` checkpoint that was saved
(corresponding to 1000 “actual” steps).
See [GitHub](https://github.com/EleutherAI/pythia) for more details on training
procedure, including [how to reproduce
it](https://github.com/EleutherAI/pythia/blob/main/README.md#reproducing-training).
Pythia uses the same tokenizer as [GPT-NeoX-
20B](https://huggingface.co./EleutherAI/gpt-neox-20b).
### Evaluations
All 16 *Pythia* models were evaluated using the [LM Evaluation
Harness](https://github.com/EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness). You can access
the results by model and step at `results/json/*` in the [GitHub
repository](https://github.com/EleutherAI/pythia/tree/main/results/json).
Expand the sections below to see plots of evaluation results for all
Pythia and Pythia-deduped models compared with OPT and BLOOM.
LAMBADA – OpenAIPhysical Interaction: Question Answering (PIQA)WinoGrandeAI2 Reasoning Challenge—Challenge SetSciQ
### Naming convention and parameter count
*Pythia* models were renamed in January 2023. It is possible that the old
naming convention still persists in some documentation by accident. The
current naming convention (70M, 160M, etc.) is based on total parameter count.