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openai
gpt-2
Python2019–2026
openai / gpt-2 · Archived

gpt-2

Code for the paper "Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners"

35Distinct people
39Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
25KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Code for the paper "Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners"

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year39 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-02-14 17:46:55 UTC to 2026-05-03 05:45:31 UTC.

0510152019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 3 submissions, 12 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15312
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Status: Archive (code is provided as-is, no updates expected) gpt-2 Code and models from the paper "Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners". You can read about GPT-2 and its staged release in our original blog post, 6 month follow-up post, and final post. We have also released a dataset for researchers to study their behaviors. * Note that our original parameter counts were wrong due to an error (in our previous blog posts and paper). Thus you may have seen small referred to as 117M and medium referred to as 345M. Usage This repository is meant to be a starting point for researchers and engineers to experiment with GPT-2. For basic information, see our model card. Some caveats GPT-2 models' robustness and worst case behaviors are not well-understood. As with any machine-learned model, carefully evaluate GPT-2 for your use case, especially if used without fine-tuning or in safety-critical applications where reliability is important. The dataset our GPT-2 models were trained on contains many texts with biases and factual inaccuracies, and thus GPT-2 models are likely to be biased and inaccurate as well. To avoid having samples mistaken as human-written, we recommend clearly labeling samples as synthetic before wide dissemination. Our models are often incoherent or inaccurate in subtle ways, which takes more than a quick read for a human to notice. Work with us Please let us know if you’re doing interesting research with or working on applications of GPT-2! We’re especially interested in hearing from and potentially working with those who are studying Potential malicious use cases and defenses against them (e.g. the detectability of synthetic text) The extent of problematic content (e.g. bias) being baked into the models and effective mitigations Development See DEVELOPERS.md Contributors See CONTRIBUTORS.md Citation Please use the following bibtex entry: @article{radford2019language, title={Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners}, author={Radford, Alec and Wu, Jeff and Child, Rewon and Luan, David and Amodei, Dario and Sutskever, Ilya}, year={2019} } Future work We may release code for evaluating the models on various benchmarks. We are still considering release of the larger models. License Modified MIT
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

39 sources
This is such a weird comment. > Since the times GPT-2 was reimplemented inside Minecraft - its quite obvious LLMs are just math. This was obvious since LLMs were first invented. They published papers with all the details, you don't need to see something implemented in Minecraft to realize that it's just math. You could simply read the paper or the code and know for certain. [0] > math is the only area of human knowledge with perfect flawless reductionism, straight to the roots Incorrect, Kurt Gödel showed with his Incompleteness Theorems in 1931 [1] that it is impossible to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for mathematics. Math is not perfectly reducible and there is no single set of "roots" for math. > It was build [sic] that way since the beginning, This is a serious misunderstanding of what mathematics is. Math is disco
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vered as much as it is built. No one sat down and planned out what we understand as modern mathematics - the math we know is the result of endless amounts of logical reasoning and exploration, from geometric proofs to calculus to linear algebra to everything else that encompasses modern mathematics. > And because of that flawless reductionism, complexity adds nothings to the nature of math things, this is how math working by design This sentence means nothing, because math is not reducible in that way. > so it can be proven there are no anything like consciousness simply because conciousness [sic] was not implented [sic] in the first place, only perfect mimicry. Even if the previous sentence held, this does not follow, because while we are conscious the current consensus is that LLMs are not and most AI experts who are not actively selling a product recognize that LLMs will not lead to human-equivalent general intelligence. [3] [0] https://github.com/openai/gpt-2 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_th... [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/mathem... [3] https://deepmind.google/research/publications/231971/
In When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
Code vs. data. The code needed create, train, and perform inference on a Transformer is quite short. How short depends on how you count the `import` statements in https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py and https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/sample.py etc. Spreadsheets performing linear regression etc., — Do they learn? Sure! If you accept that Transformers adapt and learn then you must accept that a spreadsheet also does, because someone implemented GPT-2 in Excel: https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need Do polymorphic computer viruses adapt? Border Gateway Protocol? Exponential backoff? Autocomplete? And that's aside from any algorithmic search results or "social" feeds, which are nothing but that.
In A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
I wasn't aware of this, I'd seen those URLs before but only in the context of Chinese ones and thought it was Chinese-specific. It's interesting because I just went down an apparent rabbit hole inplementing Byte-level encoding for using language models with unicode. There each byte in a unicode character is mapped to a printable character that goes up to 255 < ord(x) < 511 (I don't remember the highest but the point is each byte is mapped to another printable unicode character. See https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/9b63575ef42771a015060c9... And the actual list of characters: https://github.com/rbitr/llm.f90/blob/dev/phi2/phi2/pretoken...
In Parsing URLs in Python
Please at least read the paper before appealing to authority. It is a well designed set of experiments that clearly demonstrates that the notion of a "phase change" (rapid shift in capabilities) as a popularized by many people claiming emergence is actually a gradual improvement with more data. But if you do want to appeal to Lecun as an authority, then maybe you'll accept that these (re)tweets that clearly indicate he finds the insights from the paper to be valid: https://nitter.1d4.us/ylecun/status/1736479356917063847 https://nitter.1d4.us/rao2z/status/1736464000836309259 (retweeted) As for Timnit, I think you have your timeline confused. Model cards are what put her on the map for most general NLP researchers, which predates her difficulties at Google. 2018: Model cards paper was put on arXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03993 2019: Majo
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r ML organizations start using model cards https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/model_card.md 2020: Model cards become fairly standard https://blog.research.google/2020/07/introducing-model-card-... Dec 2020: Timnit is let go from the ethics team at Google https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55187611 EDIT:formatting
In Will scaling work?
OpenAI publishes a huge amount of research and makes huge amounts of data available for research. They do collaborate with other institutions and researchers. eg: GPT-2: paper https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language-models/l... with code: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2, output dataset https://github.com/openai/gpt-2-output-dataset and a bunch of blog posts with all manner of details GPT-3: paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 dataset https://github.com/openai/gpt-3 etc etc.
In OpenAI temporarily disables the Browse with Bing beta feature
You can find GPT-2's training dataset list - at a high level - in the GPT-2 repository on Github: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/model_card.md#da... However, OpenAI goes dark after that regarding the 'data soup' that was fed into their LLMs. In general, start around 2019 and definitely by 2020 you'll notice that research labs became much less forthcoming about the data that went into their models. As far as I'm aware, BookCorpus is one of the more commonly-used 'large books dataset' that's been utilized in recent years to train large language models (LLMs) like generative pretrained transformers: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftowardsdatascience.com... At my alma mater I remember the large-scale Google book scanning devices and what a herculean effort that was to digitize the largest university library system's books -
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University of Michigan - although only 7M texts from the entire collection of ~16 million texts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Michigan_Library) were digitized.I too was curious about the state of the Google Books project: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-10-what-happened-to-goo... This is an interesting piece of ephemera from 2005, when Google started digitizing books at UMich: https://apps.lib.umich.edu/files/services/mdp/faq.pdf As far as I recall, the Books project allowed the early n-grams functionality to be built out: https://ai.googleblog.com/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-are-belong-... The Google Books Ngram Viewer tool is actually still in existence; you can play around with it here: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?corpus=0&content=Vorsp...
In Don Knuth plays with ChatGPT
For discussion's sake: - BFN reached out to A16Z, Worldcoin, Khosla Ventures largely declined to comment, which would mean that at least one person probably had a bit of runway from at least when the requests for comment were submitted. So yeah, you're probably right. - Going from the github repos for GPT 2 and 3, those may have been hard launches: Feb 14 2019, predating the first press for GPT-2 by a few days (was probably made public Feb 14 though) - https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/commit/c2dae27c1029770cea409... May 28 2020, timed alongside the press news for GPT-3 - https://github.com/openai/gpt-3/commit/12766ba31aa6de490226e... - Would it really have to be a conspiracy? Sounds like only one person would have to target a specific date or date range, and without really giving a reason. One of the things that puts a hole in my own think
Read the rest
ing here is that Sam Altman's name isn't really tied to the Dall-E 2 release. It's just OpenAI, and the press around Sam's name today still exclusively surfaces just this one Worldcoin story (https://news.google.com/search?q=sam+altman+when%3A1d&). So if this was actually intended to bury another story, Sam's name would have to have been included in all the press blasts to be successful. But the Buzzfeed story seems like it kinda died alone on the vine.
In Dall-E 2
Eventually there will be so much software that writing code will need to be automated by machines. GPT-2 is open source and it's able to write computer programs, although not very well. GPT-3 does it better and they give it away for free. So imagine how much more advanced the stuff you have to pay money for is, or the trade secret models. You'd think programmers would move on to a higher-level of abstraction where programmers program the computer programs that do programming. That's probably not going to be the case. For example, take a look at the GPT-2 source code https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py It's only a few hundred lines of code.
In Ask HN: Why are we accepting ageism in tech as something immutable?
The GPT-2 weights were released by OpenAI when GPT-2 was released. (https://github.com/openai/gpt-2) Around that time (since no one else was doing it) I released a wrapper to streamline that code and make it much easier to finetune on your own data. (https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-simple) Nowadays, the easiest way to interact with GPT-2 is to use the transformers library (https://github.com/huggingface/transformers), of which I've created a much better library for GPT-2 that leverages it. (https://github.com/minimaxir/aitextgen)
In Does GPT-2 Know Your Phone Number?

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