Model reference · open weights
gpt2-medium is an open-weight language model from OpenAI. gpt2-medium (FP32) weighs 760 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.
Summary of the openai-community/gpt2-medium model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| Released | 2022-03-02 |
| Parameters | 380M |
| VRAM | 760 MB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Requests at once | Context max | Memory |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1K each | |||
| RTX 3060 12 GB | 102 | all 1K | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | 140 | all 1K | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | 219 | all 1K | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | 219 | all 1K | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | 295 | all 1K | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | 423 | all 1K | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | 763 | all 1K | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | 734 | all 1K | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | 890 | all 1K | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | 1000+ | all 1K | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | 1000+ | all 1K | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | 1000+ | all 1K | 176 GB |
| Requests at once | 1K tokens each |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1.4 GB |
| 5 | 1.8 GB |
| 8 | 2.1 GB |
| 16 | 2.9 GB |
| 32 | 4.5 GB |
| 64 | 7.7 GB |
One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.
From the model card
Model Description: GPT-2 Medium is the 355M parameter version of GPT-2, a transformer-based language model created and released by OpenAI. The model is a pretrained model on English language using a causal language modeling (CLM) objective.
Use the code below to get started with the model. You can use this model directly with a pipeline for text generation. Since the generation relies on some randomness, we set a seed for reproducibility:
>>> from transformers import pipeline, set_seed
>>> generator = pipeline('text-generation', model='gpt2-medium')
>>> set_seed(42)
>>> generator("Hello, I'm a language model,", max_length=30, num_return_sequences=5)
[{'generated_text': "Hello, I'm a language model, I'm a language. I'm a compiler, I'm a parser, I'm a server process. I"},
{'generated_text': "Hello, I'm a language model, and I'd like to join an existing team. What can I do to get started?\n\nI'd"},
{'generated_text': "Hello, I'm a language model, why does my code get created? Can't I just copy it? But why did my code get created when"},
{'generated_text': "Hello, I'm a language model, a functional language...\n\nI'm a functional language. Is it hard? A little, yes. But"},
{'generated_text': "Hello, I'm a language model, not an object model.\n\nIn a nutshell, I need to give me objects from which I can get"}]
Here is how to use this model to get the features of a given text in PyTorch:
from transformers import GPT2Tokenizer, GPT2Model
tokenizer = GPT2Tokenizer.from_pretrained('gpt2-medium')
model = GPT2Model.from_pretrained('gpt2-medium')
text = "Replace me by any text you'd like."
encoded_input = tokenizer(text, return_tensors='pt')
output = model(**encoded_input)
and in TensorFlow:
from transformers import GPT2Tokenizer, TFGPT2Model
tokenizer = GPT2Tokenizer.from_pretrained('gpt2-medium')
model = TFGPT2Model.from_pretrained('gpt2-medium')
text = "Replace me by any text you'd like."
encoded_input = tokenizer(text, return_tensors='tf')
output = model(encoded_input)
In their model card about GPT-2, OpenAI wrote:
The primary intended users of these models are AI researchers and practitioners.
We primarily imagine these language models will be used by researchers to better understand the behaviors, capabilities, biases, and constraints of large-scale generative language models.
In their model card about GPT-2, OpenAI wrote:
Here are some secondary use cases we believe are likely:
- Writing assistance: Grammar assistance, autocompletion (for normal prose or code)
- Creative writing and art: exploring the generation of creative, fictional texts; aiding creation of poetry and other literary art.
- Entertainment: Creation of games, chat bots, and amusing generations.
In their model card about GPT-2, OpenAI wrote:
Additionally, language models like GPT-2 reflect the biases inherent to the systems they were trained on, so we do not recommend that they be deployed into systems that interact with humans unless the deployers first carry out a study of biases relevant to the intended use-case. We found no statistically significant difference in gender, race, and religious bias probes between 774M and 1.5B, implying all versions of GPT-2 should be approached with similar levels of caution around use cases that are sensitive to biases around human attributes.
CONTENT WARNING: Readers should be aware this section contains content that is disturbing, offensive, and can propogate historical and current stereotypes.
Significant research has explored bias and fairness issues with language models (see, e.g., Sheng et al. (2021) and Bender et al. (2021)).
The training data used for this model has not been released as a dataset one can browse. We know it contains a lot of unfiltered content from the internet, which is far from neutral. Predictions generated by the model can include disturbing and harmful stereotypes across protected classes; identity characteristics; and sensitive, social, and occupational groups. For example:
>>> from transformers import pipeline, set_seed
>>> generator = pipeline('text-generation', model='gpt2-medium')
>>> set_seed(42)
>>> generator("The man worked as a", max_length=10, num_return_sequences=5)
[{'generated_text': 'The man worked as a security guard in a military'},
{'generated_text': 'The man worked as a salesman in Mexico and eventually'},
{'generated_text': 'The man worked as a supeQuoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.