This is one of the smaller pre-trained BERT variants, together with bert-tiny, [bert-mini](bert-small and bert-medium. They were introduced in the study Well-Read Students Learn Better: On the Importance of Pre-training Compact Models (arxiv), and ported to HF for the study Generalization in NLI: Ways (Not) To Go Beyond Simple Heuristics (arXiv). These models are supposed to be trained on a downstream task.

If you use the model, please consider citing both the papers:

@misc{bhargava2021generalization,
      title={Generalization in NLI: Ways (Not) To Go Beyond Simple Heuristics}, 
      author={Prajjwal Bhargava and Aleksandr Drozd and Anna Rogers},
      year={2021},
      eprint={2110.01518},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}

@article{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1908-08962,
  author    = {Iulia Turc and
               Ming{-}Wei Chang and
               Kenton Lee and
               Kristina Toutanova},
  title     = {Well-Read Students Learn Better: The Impact of Student Initialization
               on Knowledge Distillation},
  journal   = {CoRR},
  volume    = {abs/1908.08962},
  year      = {2019},
  url       = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08962},
  eprinttype = {arXiv},
  eprint    = {1908.08962},
  timestamp = {Thu, 29 Aug 2019 16:32:34 +0200},
  biburl    = {https://dblp.org/rec/journals/corr/abs-1908-08962.bib},
  bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org}
}

Config of this model:

prajjwal1/bert-small (L=4, H=512) Model Link

Other models to check out:

prajjwal1/bert-tiny (L=2, H=128) Model Link
prajjwal1/bert-mini (L=4, H=256) Model Link
prajjwal1/bert-medium (L=8, H=512) Model Link

Original Implementation and more info can be found in this Github repository.

Twitter: @prajjwal_1

prajjwal1/bert-small

prajjwal1/
bert-small