Chinese-LLaMA-Alpaca

This project provides Chinese-language versions of the LLaMA and Alpaca large language models — AI systems capable of understanding and generating text. The core problem it solves: the original LLaMA model was primarily trained on English text, so its Chinese language ability was limited. This project takes LLaMA as a starting point, expands its vocabulary with Chinese characters, and then re-trains it on Chinese text data to dramatically improve its Chinese comprehension.

Two model variants are offered. Chinese LLaMA is the base language model good at text completion — give it the start of a sentence and it generates the rest. Chinese Alpaca goes a step further by training with instruction-following data, making it behave more like a chat assistant (similar to ChatGPT) that can answer questions, write content, and follow directions in Chinese.

A key practical feature is local deployment: you can run these models on a personal laptop using just the CPU or a consumer GPU, without sending data to any cloud service. The models are distributed as LoRA weights — a compact "patch" file that you merge with the original LLaMA model weights to get the full model. Supported tools include llama.cpp, transformers, text-generation-webui, LangChain, and privateGPT. Available in 7B, 13B, and 33B parameter sizes, written in Python.