JulianKrgd/julian-600m-10b
031
Julian 600M - 10B Tokens (Early Checkpoint)
A 600M parameter decoder-only language model trained from scratch using JAX/Flax on Google Cloud TPUs.
⚠️ Early Checkpoint: This is an intermediate checkpoint at 10B tokens (~25% training). See julian-600m-40b for the fully trained model.
Model Description
Julian is a causal language model designed for text generation, trained on a mix of English (70%) and French (30%) data. The architecture follows modern best practices with RoPE positional embeddings, SwiGLU activations, and RMSNorm.
Architecture
Benchmarks (at 10B tokens / ~25% training)
Evaluated using lm-evaluation-harness (0-shot).
Comparison with Open-Source Models
💡 Key insight: Julian 600M matches GPT-2 Large (774M) on HellaSwag with only 10B tokens (vs ~40B) and 22% fewer parameters.
⚠️ Note: These results are at ~25% training. See julian-600m-40b for improved final scores.
Training Details (at this checkpoint)
Training Data
Language ratio: 70% English, 30% French.
Usage
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("JulianKrgd/julian-600m-10b")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("JulianKrgd/julian-600m-10b")
prompt = "La France est"
inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=100, do_sample=True, temperature=0.8)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True))💡 Recommendation: Use the fully trained julian-600m-40b for better results.
Model Family
Limitations
- Context Length: Limited to 2048 tokens
- Languages: Primarily English and French
- Training: Only ~25% complete at this checkpoint
- Safety: Not instruction-tuned or safety-aligned
Why Julian outperforms GPT-2?
- Modern architecture: RoPE + SwiGLU + RMSNorm (like LLaMA)
- Better data: Curated mix with quality filtering
- Efficient training: Modern optimizations (bfloat16, gradient checkpointing)
Acknowledgments
- Google Cloud TPU Research Program for compute resources
- JAX/Flax team for the excellent ML framework
- Hugging Face for model hosting
License
Apache 2.0
Citation
@misc{julian2025,
author = {Julian Kerignard},
title = {Julian: A 600M Parameter Language Model (10B Tokens Checkpoint)},
year = {2025},
publisher = {Hugging Face},
url = {https://huggingface.co/JulianKrgd/julian-600m-10b}
}