Model reference · open weights

santacoder

LLMs bigcode Text gen 1 build Its own licence terms 7k dl/mo

santacoder is an open-weight language model from bigcode. santacoder (BF16) weighs 4.6 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • SantaCoder is a 1.1B parameter text-generation model developed by bigcode for code completion in Python, Java, and JavaScript.
  • It features a 2048 token context window and utilizes a Fill-in-the-Middle objective to generate code based on source code patterns rather than natural language instructions.
  • The model is distributed under the bigcode-openrail-m license.

Summary of the bigcode/santacoder model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bybigcode
Released2022-12-02
VRAM4.6 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for santacoder (BF16)

4.6 GBweights, file size
197 MBcache per 1K tokens
581 MBruntime overhead, at least
2,048 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
2K each
RTX 3060 12 GB15all 2K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB25all 2K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB45all 2K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB45all 2K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB64all 2K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB96all 2K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB181all 2K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB173all 2K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB212all 2K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified246all 2K107 GB
H200 141 GB322all 2K138 GB
B200 180 GB416all 2K176 GB
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once2K tokens each
15.6 GB
57.2 GB
88.4 GB
1611.6 GB
3218.1 GB
6431.0 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

From the model card

What bigcode says about santacoder

Read the model card

Play with the model on the SantaCoder Space Demo.

Table of Contents

  1. Model Summary
  2. Use
  3. Limitations
  4. Training
  5. License
  6. Citation

Model Summary

The SantaCoder models are a series of 1.1B parameter models trained on the Python, Java, and JavaScript subset of The Stack (v1.1) (which excluded opt-out requests). The main model uses Multi Query Attention, a context window of 2048 tokens, and was trained using near-deduplication and comment-to-code ratio as filtering criteria and using the Fill-in-the-Middle objective. In addition there are several models that were trained on datasets with different filter parameters and with architecture and objective variations.

ModelArchitectureObjectiveFiltering
mhaMHAAR + FIMBase
no-fimMQAARBase
fimMQAAR + FIMBase
starsMQAAR + FIMGitHub stars
fertilityMQAAR + FIMTokenizer fertility
commentsMQAAR + FIMComment-to-code ratio
dedup-altMQAAR + FIMStronger near-deduplication
finalMQAAR + FIMStronger near-deduplication and comment-to-code ratio

The final model is the best performing model and was trained twice as long (236B tokens) as the others. This checkpoint is the default model and available on the main branch. All other checkpoints are on separate branches with according names.

Use

Intended use

The model was trained on GitHub code. As such it is not an instruction model and commands like "Write a function that computes the square root." do not work well. You should phrase commands like they occur in source code such as comments (e.g. # the following function computes the sqrt) or write a function signature and docstring and let the model complete the function body.

Feel free to share your generations in the Community tab!

How to use

Generation

# pip install -q transformers
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

checkpoint = "bigcode/santacoder"
device = "cuda" # for GPU usage or "cpu" for CPU usage

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint, trust_remote_code=True).to(device)

inputs = tokenizer.encode("def print_hello_world():", return_tensors="pt").to(device)
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

Fill-in-the-middle

Fill-in-the-middle uses special tokens to identify the prefix/middle/suffix part of the input and output:

input_text = "def print_hello_world():\n    \n    print('Hello world!')"
inputs = tokenizer.encode(input_text, return_tensors="pt").to(device)
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

Make sure to use , , and not , , as in StarCoder models.

Load other checkpoints

We upload the checkpoint of each experiment to a separate branch as well as the intermediate checkpoints as commits on the branches. You can load them with the revision flag:

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "bigcode/santacoder",
    revision="no-fim", # name of branch or commit hash
    trust_remote_code=True
)

Attribution & Other Requirements

The pretraining dataset of the model was filtered for permissive licenses only. Nevertheless, the model can generate source code verbatim from the dataset. The code's license might require attribution and/or other specific requirements that must be respected. We provide a search index that let's you search through the pretraining data to identify where generated code came from and apply the proper attribution to your code.

Limitations

The model has been trained on source code in Python, Java, and JavaScript. The predominant language in source is English although other languages are also present. As such the model is capable to generate code snippets provided some context but the generated code is not guaranteed to work as intended. It can be inefficient, contain bugs or exploits.

Training

Model

  • Architecture: GPT-2 model with multi-query attention and Fill-in-the-Middle objective
  • Pretraining steps: 600K
  • Pretraining tokens: 236 billion
  • Precision: float16

Hardware

  • GPUs: 96 Tesla V100
  • Training time: 6.2 days
  • Total FLOPS: 2.1 x 10e21

Software

License

The model is licensed under the BigCode OpenRAIL-M v1 license agreement. You can find the full agreement here.

Citation

@article{allal2023santacoder,
  title={SantaCoder: don't reach for the stars!},
  author={Allal, Loubna Ben and Li, Raymond and Kocetkov, Denis and Mou, Chenghao and Akiki, Christopher and Ferrandis, Carlos Munoz and Muennighoff, Niklas and Mishra, Mayank and Gu, Alex and Dey, Manan and others},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.03988},
  year={2023}
}

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

Benchmarks

Reported results

As published on the model card: the maker's own numbers, not measured by AxForge.

TaskDatasetMetricScore
text-generationMultiPL HumanEval (Python)pass@10.180
text-generationMultiPL HumanEval (Python)pass@100.290
text-generationMultiPL HumanEval (Python)pass@1000.490
text-generationMultiPL MBPP (Python)pass@10.350
text-generationMultiPL MBPP (Python)pass@100.580
text-generationMultiPL MBPP (Python)pass@1000.770
text-generationMultiPL HumanEval (JavaScript)pass@10.160
text-generationMultiPL HumanEval (JavaScript)pass@100.270
text-generationMultiPL HumanEval (JavaScript)pass@1000.470
text-generationMultiPL MBPP (Javascript)pass@10.280
text-generationMultiPL MBPP (Javascript)pass@100.510
text-generationMultiPL MBPP (Javascript)pass@1000.700
text-generationMultiPL HumanEval (Java)pass@10.150
text-generationMultiPL HumanEval (Java)pass@100.260
text-generationMultiPL HumanEval (Java)pass@1000.410
text-generationMultiPL MBPP (Java)pass@10.280
text-generationMultiPL MBPP (Java)pass@100.440
text-generationMultiPL MBPP (Java)pass@1000.590
text-generationHumanEval FIM (Python)single_line0.440
text-generationMultiPL HumanEval FIM (Java)single_line0.620
text-generationMultiPL HumanEval FIM (JavaScript)single_line0.600
text-generationCodeXGLUE code-to-text (Python)BLEU18.130
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