  Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable ability to comprehend,
reason, and generate following nature language instructions. However, the
development of LLMs has been primarily focused on high-resource languages, such
as English, thereby limiting their applicability and research in other
languages. Consequently, we present PolyLM, a multilingual LLM trained on 640
billion (B) tokens, avaliable in two model sizes: 1.7B and 13B. To enhance its
multilingual capabilities, we 1) integrate bilingual data into training data;
and 2) adopt a curriculum learning strategy that increases the proportion of
non-English data from 30% in the first stage to 60% in the final stage during
pre-training. Further, we propose a multilingual self-instruct method which
automatically generates 132.7K diverse multilingual instructions for model
fine-tuning. To assess the model's performance, we collect several existing
multilingual tasks, including multilingual understanding, question answering,
generation, and translation. Extensive experiments show that PolyLM surpasses
other open-source models such as LLaMA and BLOOM on multilingual tasks while
maintaining comparable performance in English. Our models, alone with the
instruction data and multilingual benchmark, are available at:
\url{https://modelscope.cn/models/damo/nlp_polylm_13b_text_generation}.
