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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 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:00:59 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

15 sources
Tangent rant. I'm skimming over some of the code at https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py and I can't help but feel frustrated at how unreadable this stuff is. 1. Why is it acceptable to have single-letter variable names everywhere? 2. There's little to almost no documentation in the code itself. It's unclear what the parameters of any given function mean. 3. There are magic constants everywhere. 4. Function names are so terse... ("gelu", "attn")
In OpenAI Releases Largest GPT-2 Text Generation Model
They did release the model [0]. A smaller-scale version of it. If you want the big one, all you have to do is scrape 45M web pages, and increase the parameters to scale. What they didn't release is the training corpus and the trained filters. By not releasing these, and focusing on ethics, they are trying to avert attention from the mistake of training a massive cyclops on unfiltered internet text. They probably read a lot of embarrassing text they didn't share, imagine that. 0. https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/
In Dear OpenAI: Please Open Source Your Language Model

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

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