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Limits RegistryGPT-3's 175-billion-parameter scale, detailed in OpenAI's 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners' paper, was the largest publicly documented dense language model at its May 2020 release, requiring an estimated 3.14x10^23 floating-point operations to train. It demonstrated strong 'few-shot' task performance from prompting alone, without task-specific fine-tuning, and its scale is widely credited with popularizing the empirical scaling-laws approach to language model development.
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GPT-3's 175-billion-parameter scale, detailed in OpenAI's 'Language Models are Few-Shot Learners' paper, was the largest publicly documented dense language model at its May 2020 release, requiring an estimated 3.14x10^23 floating-point operations to train. It demonstrated strong 'few-shot' task performance from prompting alone, without task-specific fine-tuning, and its scale is widely credited with popularizing the empirical scaling-laws approach to language model development.
OpenAI's GPT-3, described in a May 2020 paper, was released as a 175-billion-parameter dense transformer language model, more than 10x larger than the next largest publicly documented dense language model at the time (Microsoft's Turing-NLG, 17 billion parameters).
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Permanent ID limitsregistry.com/limits/LR-GPT3-PARAMETER-COUNT
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Limits Registry. LR-GPT3-PARAMETER-COUNT. GPT-3 — largest publicly documented language model of its time. 2026.