The Era of 1-bit LLMs: All Large Language Models are in 1.58 Bits
Shuming Ma Hongyu Wang Lingxiao Ma Lei Wang Wenhui Wang Shaohan Huang Li Dong Ruiping Wang Jilong Xue Furu Wei
Recent research, such as BitNet, is paving the way for a new era of 1-bit
Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce a 1-bit LLM variant,
namely BitNet b1.58, in which every single parameter (or weight) of the LLM is
ternary {-1, 0, 1}. It matches the full-precision (i.e., FP16 or BF16)
Transformer LLM with the same model size and training tokens in terms of both
perplexity and end-task performance, while being significantly more
cost-effective in terms of latency, memory, throughput, and energy consumption.
More profoundly, the 1.58-bit LLM defines a new scaling law and recipe for
training new generations of LLMs that are both high-performance and
cost-effective. Furthermore, it enables a new computation paradigm and opens
the door for designing specific hardware optimized for 1-bit LLMs.