Technical experiment

Training a German Language Model

An end-to-end experiment in preparing data and training a 358-million-parameter German GPT-style model from scratch.

Status Completed

This independent technical project documents the full process of training a German GPT-2-style language model: preparing a large German Common Crawl corpus, configuring the model and tokenizer, running distributed training, and evaluating the result.

The resulting model has 358 million parameters and a context window of 2,048 tokens. The project is primarily an engineering and learning experiment, rather than part of my main research program on reliable machine learning.

Connected work

Outputs

1 entry

Articles and documentation

Training a German LLM from Scratch (14 Nov. 2024)
This article is not finished and will be updated. The research group I work with has access to a small GPU cluster, which occasionally sits idle. To avoid wasting valuable compute resources (IDLE GPUs essentially burn money through opportunity costs), I decided to train a German …
Categories: Deep Learning
Tagged with: Deep Learning · Generative Models · LLM
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