Model reference · open weights

gpt2-medium

LLMs openai-community Text gen 1 build Open weights 352k dl/mo

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.

  • GPT-2 Medium is a transformer-based language model developed by OpenAI for text generation tasks.
  • It contains 380M parameters, supports a context length of 1024 tokens, and is trained on English data.
  • The model is released under the MIT license.

Summary of the openai-community/gpt2-medium model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byOpenAI
Released2022-03-02
Parameters380M
VRAM760 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for gpt2-medium (FP32)

760 MBweights, file size
98 MBcache per 1K tokens
531 MBruntime overhead, at least
1,024 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
1K each
RTX 3060 12 GB102all 1K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB140all 1K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB219all 1K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB219all 1K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB295all 1K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB423all 1K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB763all 1K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB734all 1K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB890all 1K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified1000+all 1K107 GB
H200 141 GB1000+all 1K138 GB
B200 180 GB1000+all 1K176 GB
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once1K tokens each
11.4 GB
51.8 GB
82.1 GB
162.9 GB
324.5 GB
647.7 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

From the model card

What OpenAI says about gpt2-medium

Read the model card

Model Details

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.

How to Get Started with the Model

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)

Uses

Direct Use

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.

Downstream Use

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.
Misuse and Out-of-scope Use

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.

Risks, Limitations and Biases

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 supe

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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