PandaLLM is an open-source project building large language models for the Chinese language, launched in May 2023 by a Chinese developer community based overseas. It covers the full stack around a model family โ the models themselves, a training and deployment toolkit, and a developer community. The repository is Apache-2.0 licensed and has earned over 1,000 stars on GitHub.
The Panda model series is produced by continual pre-training of LLaMA 1 and LLaMA 2 on Chinese corpora, with both the models and the Chinese datasets used for training released openly for free use and community development. Alongside the models, PandaLLMOps provides tooling for the whole lifecycle: pre-training from scratch, incremental pre-training, full-parameter fine-tuning, and LoRA and QLoRA adaptation, plus fast deployment with inference engines such as vLLM and LightLLM integrated to maximize throughput. The third leg of the project, PandaCommunity, supports Chinese-language LLM developers sharing practice and results. Together the three parts aim to lower the barrier for the community to explore the complete LLM technology stack end to end.
The project’s timing mattered: starting in May 2023, just as open LLMs were taking off, Panda gave Chinese developers an open alternative at a moment when most capable models were English-first. Its emphasis on releasing the training data alongside the models was equally deliberate โ data curation is where much of a language model’s quality is decided, and open datasets let the community audit, improve, and extend the work rather than treating the model as a black-box artifact.
PandaLLM is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 license, including the released models and datasets.
It is aimed at Chinese-language NLP researchers and developers who want an open foundation โ models plus the operational tooling โ for building and studying Chinese LLMs.