Definition
Plain language
A widely used software toolkit that helps train very large models.
As stated in the literature
Microsoft's library for distributed training of large neural networks, including ZeRO sharding, CPU offloading, and gradient accumulation.
Why it matters: It's one of the standard toolkits that determines what training runs are even feasible on a given hardware budget.
For example, a team trains a 30-billion-parameter model on eight GPUs by enabling DeepSpeed's ZeRO-3 sharding to split the optimizer state across devices.
Heard on the show
“The first bug they found is in DeepSpeed, the library that handles memory optimization for huge models.”Episode 009 — How Two Silent Library Bugs Quietly Invalidated a Wave of Reasoning Papers