Megatron-Turing Reviews

The training of state-of-the art language models is extremely difficult. They require large compute budgets, complex distributed computing techniques and deep ML knowledge. Few organizations are able to train large language models from scratch. The number of organizations that do not open source their results is increasing, even though they have the expertise and resources to do so. We at Cerebras believe in open access to the latest models. Cerebras is proud to announce that Cerebras GPT, a family GPT models with 111 million to thirteen billion parameters, has been released to the open-source community. These models are trained using the Chinchilla Formula and provide the highest accuracy within a given computing budget. Cerebras GPT has faster training times and lower training costs. It also consumes less power than any other publicly available model.

PanGu-a was developed under MindSpore, and trained on 2048 Ascend AI processors. The MindSpore Auto-parallel parallelism strategy was implemented to scale the training task efficiently to 2048 processors. This includes data parallelism as well as op-level parallelism. We pretrain PanGu-a with 1.1TB of high-quality Chinese data collected from a variety of domains in order to enhance its generalization ability. We test the generation abilities of PanGua in different scenarios, including text summarizations, question answering, dialog generation, etc. We also investigate the effects of model scaling on the few shot performances across a wide range of Chinese NLP task. The experimental results show that PanGu-a is superior in performing different tasks with zero-shot or few-shot settings.