Model reference · open weights

Starling-LM-beta

LLMs Nexusflow Text gen 1 build Open weights 1k dl/mo

Starling-LM-beta is an open-weight language model from Nexusflow. Starling-LM-7B-beta (BF16) weighs 14.5 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is 2× RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • Starling-LM-beta is a 7.2 billion parameter text-generation model developed by Nexusflow and finetuned from Openchat-3.5-0106 using Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback.
  • It supports English with an 8192 token context length and is released under the Apache-2.0 license.

Summary of the Nexusflow/Starling-LM-7B-beta model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byNexusflow
Released2024-03-19
Parameters7.2B
VRAM14.5 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for Starling-LM-7B-beta (BF16)

14.5 GBweights, file size
0 MBcache per 1K tokens
1.1 GBwindow cache per request
647 MBruntime overhead, at least
8,192 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each
RTX 3060 12 GB——11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB——15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB7all 8K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB7all 8K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB14all 8K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB26all 8K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB58all 8K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB55all 8K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB70all 8K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified83all 8K107 GB
H200 141 GB111all 8K138 GB
B200 180 GB146all 8K176 GB
2× RTX 3060 12 GB
tensor parallel
6all 8K11.6 GB a card
2× RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
tensor parallel
14all 8K15.4 GB a card
2× RTX 4090 24 GB
tensor parallel
28all 8K23.4 GB a card
2× RTX 3090 24 GB
tensor parallel
28all 8K23.4 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each
116.2 GB
520.5 GB
823.7 GB
1632.3 GB
3249.5 GB
6483.8 GB

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

From the model card

What Nexusflow says about Starling-LM-beta

Read the model card
  • Developed by: The Nexusflow Team ( Banghua Zhu * , Evan Frick * , Tianhao Wu * , Hanlin Zhu, Karthik Ganesan, Wei-Lin Chiang, Jian Zhang, and Jiantao Jiao).
  • Model type: Language Model finetuned with RLHF / RLAIF
  • License: Apache-2.0 license under the condition that the model is not used to compete with OpenAI
  • Finetuned from model: Openchat-3.5-0106 (based on Mistral-7B-v0.1)

We introduce Starling-LM-7B-beta, an open large language model (LLM) trained by Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF). Starling-LM-7B-beta is trained from Openchat-3.5-0106 with our new reward model Nexusflow/Starling-RM-34B and policy optimization method Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences (PPO). Harnessing the power of the ranking dataset, berkeley-nest/Nectar, the upgraded reward model, Starling-RM-34B, and the new reward training and policy tuning pipeline, Starling-LM-7B-beta scores an improved 8.12 in MT Bench with GPT-4 as a judge.

Uses

Important: Please use the exact chat template provided below for the model. Otherwise there will be a degradation in the performance. The model output can be verbose in rare cases. Please consider setting temperature = 0 to make this happen less.

Our model follows the exact chat template and usage as Openchat-3.5-0106. Please refer to their model card for more details. In addition, our model is hosted on LMSYS Chatbot Arena for free test.

The conversation template is the same as Openchat-3.5-0106:

import transformers
tokenizer = transformers.AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("openchat/openchat-3.5-0106")

# Single-turn
tokens = tokenizer("GPT4 Correct User: HelloGPT4 Correct Assistant:").input_ids
assert tokens == [1, 420, 6316, 28781, 3198, 3123, 1247, 28747, 22557, 32000, 420, 6316, 28781, 3198, 3123, 21631, 28747]

# Multi-turn
tokens = tokenizer("GPT4 Correct User: HelloGPT4 Correct Assistant: HiGPT4 Correct User: How are you today?GPT4 Correct Assistant:").input_ids
assert tokens == [1, 420, 6316, 28781, 3198, 3123, 1247, 28747, 22557, 32000, 420, 6316, 28781, 3198, 3123, 21631, 28747, 15359, 32000, 420, 6316, 28781, 3198, 3123, 1247, 28747, 1602, 460, 368, 3154, 28804, 32000, 420, 6316, 28781, 3198, 3123, 21631, 28747]

# Coding Mode
tokens = tokenizer("Code User: Implement quicksort using C++Code Assistant:").input_ids
assert tokens == [1, 7596, 1247, 28747, 26256, 2936, 7653, 1413, 334, 1680, 32000, 7596, 21631, 28747]

Code Examples

import transformers

tokenizer = transformers.AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Nexusflow/Starling-LM-7B-beta")
model = transformers.AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("Nexusflow/Starling-LM-7B-beta")

def generate_response(prompt):
    input_ids = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt").input_ids
    outputs = model.generate(
        input_ids,
        max_length=256,
        pad_token_id=tokenizer.pad_token_id,
        eos_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id,
    )
    response_ids = outputs[0]
    response_text = tokenizer.decode(response_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)
    return response_text

# Single-turn conversation
prompt = "Hello, how are you?"
single_turn_prompt = f"GPT4 Correct User: {prompt}GPT4 Correct Assistant:"
response_text = generate_response(single_turn_prompt)
print("Response:", response_text)

## Multi-turn conversation
prompt = "Hello"
follow_up_question =  "How are you today?"
response = ""
multi_turn_prompt = f"GPT4 Correct User: {prompt}GPT4 Correct Assistant: {response}GPT4 Correct User: {follow_up_question}GPT4 Correct Assistant:"
response_text = generate_response(multi_turn_prompt)
print("Multi-turn conversation response:", response_text)

### Coding conversation
prompt = "Implement quicksort using C++"
coding_prompt = f"Code User: {prompt}Code Assistant:"
response = generate_response(coding_prompt)
print("Coding conversation response:", response)

License

The dataset, model and online demo is subject to the Terms of Use of the data generated by OpenAI, and Privacy Practices of ShareGPT. Please contact us if you find any potential violation.

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Tianle Li from UC Berkeley for detailed feedback and evaluation of this beta release. We would like to thank the LMSYS Organization for their support of lmsys-chat-1M dataset, evaluation and online demo. We would like to thank the open source community for their efforts in providing the datasets and base models we used to develope the project, including but not limited to Anthropic, Llama, Mistral, Hugging Face H4, LMSYS, OpenChat, OpenBMB, Flan and ShareGPT.

Citation

@misc{starling2023,
    title = {Starling-7B: Improving LLM Helpfulness & Harmlessness with RLAIF},
    url = {},
    author = {Zhu, Banghua and Frick, Evan and Wu, Tianhao and Zhu, Hanlin and Ganesan, Karthik and Chiang, Wei-Lin and Zhang, Jian and Jiao, Jiantao},
    month = {November},
    year = {2023}
}

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

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