MaxText
Google's open JAX framework for LLM training on Cloud TPUs and GPUs, from one host to tens of thousands of chips.
About
Written in pure Python and JAX, MaxText is Google's open reference framework for training LLMs on Cloud TPUs and GPUs, part of the AI Hypercomputer stack. It leans on the XLA compiler rather than hand-written kernels to reach high model FLOPs utilization, and Google has demonstrated pretraining runs spanning tens of thousands of chips. Model coverage includes the Gemma, Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, Mixtral, and GPT-OSS families along with Moonshot Kimi models, with both pretraining and post-training paths: supervised fine-tuning recipes plus GRPO and GSPO reinforcement learning, including RL for Qwen3-scale MoE models in recent releases. The framework installs from PyPI, configuration is YAML driven, and documentation at maxtext.readthedocs.io walks through single-host getting-started runs up to multi-pod cluster jobs. Everything is Apache-2.0 licensed. Around 2,400 GitHub stars understate its influence: it serves as the canonical demonstration of JAX scaling practice and a starting point that teams fork to build their own TPU or GPU training stacks.
Should you use MaxText?
Pick it when
Use it when you train or post-train LLMs on Google Cloud TPUs, or want a JAX reference stack that scales from one host to multi-pod jobs with Gemma, Llama, DeepSeek, or Qwen recipes and GRPO reinforcement learning.
Look elsewhere when
If your team lives in PyTorch on NVIDIA GPUs, torchtitan or Megatron-LM fit existing tooling better. It is a reference framework that teams often fork, so expect to own your modifications rather than rely on a packaged product.
Alternatives to MaxText
- torchtitan
PyTorch-native counterpart for large-scale pretraining with FSDP2 and float8 on NVIDIA GPUs, with no TPU path.
- Megatron-LM
NVIDIA's GPU-first training library with tensor, pipeline, and expert parallelism, under a custom NVIDIA license.
- GPT-NeoX
Megatron and DeepSpeed pretraining for Slurm or MPI GPU clusters, including AMD MI250X, instead of TPUs.
- verl
If your goal is RL post-training on GPUs rather than pretraining, verl offers more algorithms and vLLM or SGLang rollouts.
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Details
- Category
- Model Training & Fine-Tuning
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Advanced (4/5)
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Added
- Jul 29, 2026