We introduce GLM-130B, a bilingual (English and Chinese) pre-trained language model with 130 billion parameters. It is an attempt to open-source a 100B-scale model as good as GPT-3 (davinci) and unveil how models of such a scale can be successfully pre-trained. Over the course of this effort, we face numerous unexpected technical and engineering challenges, particularly on loss spikes and divergence. In this paper, we introduce the pre-training process of GLM-130B including its design choices, training strategies for both efficiency and stability, and engineering efforts. The resultant GLM-130B model offers significant outperformance over GPT-3 175B on a wide range of popular English benchmarks while the performance advantage is not observed in OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B. It also consistently and significantly outperforms ERNIE TITAN 3.0 260B—the largest Chinese language model—across related benchmarks. Finally, we leverage a unique scaling property of GLM-130B to reach INT4 quantization with almost no performance loss, making it the first among 100B-scale models and more importantly, allowing its effective inference on 4×RTX 3090 (24G) or 8×RTX 2080 Ti (11G) GPUs, the most ever affordable GPUs required for using 100B-scale models. The GLM-130B model weights are publicly accessible and its code, training logs, related toolkit, and lessons learned are open-sourced at https://github.com/THUDM/GLM-130B/.