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Mesh-TensorFlow Transformer 4.9B (language)

Training compute
1.6×10²⁰ FLOP
Parameters
4.9B
Published
Nov 5, 2018

Mesh-TensorFlow Transformer 4.9B (language) is an AI model developed by Google Brain (United States), first published in November 2018. It works in the language domain, on tasks such as language modeling/generation and translation.

Training it took an estimated 1.6×10²⁰ FLOP of compute (estimation method: hardware). The model has 4,900,000,000 parameters. It was trained on roughly 5B datapoints. Training ran on 256 Google TPU v2 for about 13 hours. The compute alone is estimated at $935 in 2023 dollars.

Access: Unreleased. Its weights are not openly released. The reference paper has 437 citations. Epoch AI rates the confidence of this record as confident.

Full record
Organization
Google Brain
Country of organization
United States
Domain
Language
Task
Language modeling/generation, Translation
Training compute
1.6×10²⁰ FLOP
Compute estimation method
Hardware
Parameters
4,900,000,000
Dataset size
5B
Training hardware
Google TPU v2
Chips used
256
Training time
13 h
Chip-hours
3.3K
Training power draw
148.1 kW
Training cost (2023 USD)
$935
Model accessibility
Unreleased
Open weights
No
Citations
437
Epoch confidence
Confident
More from Google Brain
SourceEpoch AI, 'AI Models'. Published online at epoch.ai. Retrieved 2026-07-29 from https://epoch.ai/data/ai-models. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
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