We introduce GLM-130B, a bilingual (English and Chinese) pre-trained language
model with 130 billion parameters. It is an attempt to open-source a 100B-scale
model at least as good as GPT-3 (davinci) and unveil how models of such a scale
can be successfully pre-trained. Over the course of this effort, we face
numerous unexpected technical and engineering challenges, particularly on loss
spikes and divergence. In this paper, we introduce the training process of
GLM-130B including its design choices, training strategies for both efficiency
and stability, and engineering efforts. The resultant GLM-130B model offers
significant outperformance over GPT-3 175B (davinci) on a wide range of popular
English benchmarks while the performance advantage is not observed in OPT-175B
and BLOOM-176B. It also consistently and significantly outperforms ERNIE TITAN
3.0 260B -- the largest Chinese language model -- across related benchmarks.
Finally, we leverage a unique scaling property of GLM-130B to reach INT4
quantization without post training, with almost no performance loss, making it
the first among 100B-scale models and more importantly, allowing its effective
inference on 4×RTX 3090 (24G) or 8×RTX 2080 Ti (11G) GPUs, the
most affordable GPUs required for using 100B-scale models. The GLM-130B model
weights are publicly accessible and its code, training logs, related toolkit,
and lessons learned are open-sourced at
\url{https://github.com/THUDM/GLM-130B/}.Comment: Accepted to ICLR 202