#1717th of 19 in Training and fine-tuning

litgpt

PyTorch LLM implementations with recipes to pretrain, finetune, evaluate and serve

Stars
13.7k
License
Apache-2.0
Last commit
Sep 2026
Last release
Jun 2026
Language
Python

Missed the latest GitHub check; these facts may be older.

Lightning AI is hiring: 55 open roles

Overview

LitGPT reimplements 20+ open LLM families (Llama, Gemma, Phi, Qwen, Mistral and others) from scratch in PyTorch, without abstraction layers. A single CLI covers download, chat, finetune (LoRA, QLoRA, adapter), pretrain, continued pretraining, evaluate and serve, plus a Python `LLM` API. Training supports FSDP, flash attention and reduced precision (fp4/8/16/32) across 1 to 1000+ GPUs or TPUs.

Who it is for: ML engineers finetuning or pretraining open LLMs in PyTorch

Strengths

  • Single CLI covers download, finetune, pretrain, evaluate, chat and serve
  • Readable single-file model implementations, easy to debug and modify
  • Supports LoRA, QLoRA, adapter finetuning and full pretraining from scratch
  • Apache-2.0 license with YAML training recipes

Weaknesses

  • Built-in `litgpt serve` exposes a simple /predict endpoint, not documented as OpenAI-compatible
  • Only the listed model families are supported; new architectures need code added
  • No Docker or compose files in the repo
  • README promotes Lightning Cloud for GPUs; hardware requirements per model not stated

What it needs

  • GPU optional
  • Needs PyTorch, Hugging Face Hub (weight download)
  • Models: Llama 2/3.x, Gemma 1/2/3, Phi 1.5-4, Qwen2.5/Qwen3, Mistral/Mixtral
  • port 8000

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