Due to concerns about malicious applications, GPT2 will not be released (2019)
OpenAI's landmark 2019 GPT-2 post withheld the full 1.5B-parameter model over misuse concerns, releasing only a smaller variant and paper.
OpenAI announced GPT-2, a 1.5-billion-parameter transformer language model trained on 8 million web pages (40GB of text), achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot results including 70.70% on Winograd Schema and 63.24% on LAMBADA. Citing concerns about malicious applications such as scalable synthetic disinformation, OpenAI declined to release the trained model and instead published a smaller model and a technical paper as a 'responsible disclosure' experiment. The post, resurfaced on Hacker News in 2026, also documents failure modes like repetition and world-modeling errors, and discusses policy implications of controllable text generation.
- GPT-2: 1.5B-parameter transformer trained on 40GB of internet text
- State-of-the-art zero-shot on Winograd Schema, LAMBADA, Children's Book Test
- Full model withheld over malicious-use concerns (synthetic disinformation)
- Staged release: smaller model plus technical paper for researchers
- OpenAI framed the withheld release as a responsible disclosure experiment
From the original article
11 min read at openai.com
OpenAI We’ve trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization—all without task-specific training.
By Jimmc414 · openai.com
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