Model reference · open weights

zephyr-alpha

LLMs HuggingFaceH4 Text gen 1 build Open weights 3k dl/mo

zephyr-alpha is an open-weight language model from Hugging Face. zephyr-7b-alpha (BF16) weighs 14.5 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is 2× RTX 3060 12 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • Zephyr-7B-α is a 7.2 billion parameter text-generation model developed by Hugging Face.
  • It is a fine-tuned version of Mistral-7B-v0.1 designed to act as a helpful assistant for English language tasks.
  • The model supports a context length of 32,768 tokens and is released under the MIT license.

Summary of the HuggingFaceH4/zephyr-7b-alpha model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byHugging Face
Released2023-10-09
Parameters7.2B
VRAM14.5 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for zephyr-7b-alpha (BF16)

14.5 GBweights, file size
0 MBcache per 1K tokens
1.1 GBwindow cache per request
647 MBruntime overhead, at least
32,768 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each32K each
RTX 3060 12 GB11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB77all 32K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB77all 32K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB1414all 32K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB2626all 32K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB5858all 32K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB5522all 32K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB7028all 32K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified8333all 32K107 GB
H200 141 GB11144all 32K138 GB
B200 180 GB14636all 32K176 GB
2× RTX 3060 12 GB
tensor parallel
66all 32K11.6 GB a card
2× RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
tensor parallel
1414all 32K15.4 GB a card
2× RTX 4090 24 GB
tensor parallel
2828all 32K23.4 GB a card
2× RTX 3090 24 GB
tensor parallel
2828all 32K23.4 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each32K tokens each
116.2 GB16.2 GB
520.5 GB20.5 GB
823.7 GB23.7 GB
1632.3 GB32.3 GB
3249.5 GB49.5 GB
6483.8 GB83.8 GB

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

From the model card

What Hugging Face says about zephyr-alpha

Read the model card

Zephyr is a series of language models that are trained to act as helpful assistants. Zephyr-7B-α is the first model in the series, and is a fine-tuned version of mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1 that was trained on on a mix of publicly available, synthetic datasets using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We found that removing the in-built alignment of these datasets boosted performance on MT Bench and made the model more helpful. However, this means that model is likely to generate problematic text when prompted to do so.

Model description

  • Model type: A 7B parameter GPT-like model fine-tuned on a mix of publicly available, synthetic datasets.
  • Language(s) (NLP): Primarily English
  • License: MIT
  • Finetuned from model: mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1

Model Sources

  • Repository: https://github.com/huggingface/alignment-handbook
  • Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceH4/zephyr-chat

Intended uses & limitations

The model was initially fine-tuned on a variant of the UltraChat dataset, which contains a diverse range of synthetic dialogues generated by ChatGPT. We then further aligned the model with 🤗 TRL's DPOTrainer on the openbmb/UltraFeedback dataset, which contain 64k prompts and model completions that are ranked by GPT-4. As a result, the model can be used for chat and you can check out our demo to test its capabilities.

Here's how you can run the model using the pipeline() function from 🤗 Transformers:

# Install transformers from source - only needed for versions <= v4.34
# pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.git
# pip install accelerate

import torch
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("text-generation", model="HuggingFaceH4/zephyr-7b-alpha", torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="auto")

# We use the tokenizer's chat template to format each message - see https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main/en/chat_templating
messages = [
    {
        "role": "system",
        "content": "You are a friendly chatbot who always responds in the style of a pirate",
    },
    {"role": "user", "content": "How many helicopters can a human eat in one sitting?"},
]
prompt = pipe.tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True)
outputs = pipe(prompt, max_new_tokens=256, do_sample=True, temperature=0.7, top_k=50, top_p=0.95)
print(outputs[0]["generated_text"])
#
# You are a friendly chatbot who always responds in the style of a pirate.
#
# How many helicopters can a human eat in one sitting?
#
# Ah, me hearty matey! But yer question be a puzzler! A human cannot eat a helicopter in one sitting, as helicopters are not edible. They be made of metal, plastic, and other materials, not food!

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

Zephyr-7B-α has not been aligned to human preferences with techniques like RLHF or deployed with in-the-loop filtering of responses like ChatGPT, so the model can produce problematic outputs (especially when prompted to do so). It is also unknown what the size and composition of the corpus was used to train the base model (mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1), however it is likely to have included a mix of Web data and technical sources like books and code. See the Falcon 180B model card for an example of this.

Training and evaluation data

Zephyr 7B Alpha achieves the following results on the evaluation set:

  • Loss: 0.4605
  • Rewards/chosen: -0.5053
  • Rewards/rejected: -1.8752
  • Rewards/accuracies: 0.7812
  • Rewards/margins: 1.3699
  • Logps/rejected: -327.4286
  • Logps/chosen: -297.1040
  • Logits/rejected: -2.7153
  • Logits/chosen: -2.7447

Training procedure

Training hyperparameters

The following hyperparameters were used during training:

  • learning_rate: 5e-07
  • train_batch_size: 2
  • eval_batch_size: 4
  • seed: 42
  • distributed_type: multi-GPU
  • num_devices: 16
  • total_train_batch_size: 32
  • total_eval_batch_size: 64
  • optimizer: Adam with betas=(0.9,0.999) and epsilon=1e-08
  • lr_scheduler_type: linear
  • lr_scheduler_warmup_ratio: 0.1
  • num_epochs: 1

Training results

Training LossEpochStepValidation LossRewards/chosenRewards/rejectedRewards/accuraciesRewards/marginsLogps/rejectedLogps/chosenLogits/rejectedLogits/chosen
0.56020.051000.5589-0.3359-0.81680.71880.4809-306.2607-293.7161-2.6554-2.6797
0.48520.12000.5136-0.5310-1.49940.81250.9684-319.9124-297.6181-2.5762-2.5957
0.52120.153000.5168-0.1686-1.17600.78121.0074-313.4444-290.3699-2.6865-2.7125
0.54960.214000.4835-0.1617-1.71700.82811.5552-324.2635-290.2326-2.7947-2.8218
0.52090.265000.5054-0.4778-1.66040.73441.1826-323.1325-296.5546-2.8388-2.8667
0.46170.316000.4910-0.3738-1.51800.76561.

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

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