DISTRO

Closed weights Nous Research 1.2B parameters August 2024

No estimate

No hardware requirements for this model

The weights for this model have not been published, so it cannot be downloaded or run on your own hardware at any size. It is reachable only through its provider, and no graphics card changes that.

On record

Full specification

Everything on record for this model. Most of it describes how it was trained rather than how it runs — useful context for judging how much work went into it, and how it compares with models built at a different scale.

Origin

Who built this model, where, and when it was published.

Organisation
Nous Research
Organisation type
Industry
Country
United States of America
Published
26 August 2024
Authors
Bowen Peng, Jeffrey Quesnelle, Dillon Rolnick, Ari Lotter, Umer H. Adil, Esteban La Rocca

What it does

The problem areas the model was built for. A model can carry several of each.

Domain
Language
Task
Language modeling/generation, Chat, Question answering

Size

How large the model is and how much data it was trained on. Parameters are the figure that decides whether it fits on a given graphics card.

Parameters
1.2B

1.2B

Training data
100,000,000,000 tokens

Total Steps 25000 Sequence Length 2048 Batch Size 2048 (4M tokens) Total Tokens 104.8576B

Training compute

The arithmetic performed to train the model, measured in floating-point operations. It is a measure of what the training run cost, not of how fast the finished model answers you.

Training compute
7.1 × 10²⁰ FLOP

6 FLOP / parameter / token * 1.2*10^9 parameters * 104857600000 tokens = 7.5497472e+20 FLOP 989500000000000 FLOP / GPU / sec [bf16 assumed] *19.8 hours * 3600 sec / hour * 32 GPUs * 0.3 [assumed utilization] = 6.7710298e+20 FLOP sqrt(6.7710298e+20*7.5497472e+20) = 7.1497946e+20

How it was established
Operation counting,Hardware

The training run

What it physically took to train: which chips, how many, for how long, and what that drew from the wall.

Training hardware
NVIDIA H100 SXM5 80GB
Chips used
32
Wall-clock time
20 hours
Power draw
44.2 kW

How it is classified

Labels the source dataset applies when tracking notable models, and how confident it is in the entry.

Record confidence
Confident

Sources

Where this record came from and when it was last checked.

Reference
A PRELIMINARY REPORT ON DISTRO
Last updated
28 November 2025

What the numbers mean

What this model is

DISTRO was published by Nous Research, in United States of America, in August 2024. industry is the category the publisher falls under.

It works in Language, and is recorded as doing language modeling/generation, Chat, Question answering.

This is a closed model: the trained values stayed with whoever produced them, and there is no local version to run.

How it was trained

Producing it required around 7.1 × 10²⁰ FLOP of arithmetic, on NVIDIA H100 SXM5 80GB, which is a statement about the training budget rather than about inference.

It was trained on about 100,000,000,000 tokens of text.

Answers

DISTRO — common questions

01

Who created DISTRO?

DISTRO was published by Nous Research, based in United States of America, categorised as industry.

02

When was DISTRO released?

DISTRO was published in August 2024. Capability per parameter has improved considerably since, so a newer model of the same size is often the better use of the same hardware.

03

What is DISTRO used for?

DISTRO works in Language, and is recorded as handling language modeling/generation, Chat, Question answering. These are the areas it was designed around; they describe intent rather than a hard boundary.

04

How much compute was used to train DISTRO?

Around 7.1 × 10²⁰ FLOP, on NVIDIA H100 SXM5 80GB. That measures what producing the model cost and says nothing about how quickly it answers once trained — inference speed comes from memory bandwidth, not from the training budget.

05

What GPU do I need to run DISTRO?

None. DISTRO is a closed model — its weights were never published, so it cannot be downloaded or run on your own hardware at any price. It is reachable only through its provider.

06

Is DISTRO open source?

The licensing for DISTRO was never recorded in our source data. We treat unstated licensing as closed, because an unrecorded licence is not one to rely on.

07

How many parameters does DISTRO have?

DISTRO has 1.2B parameters. 1.2B. That figure is the total, and it is what decides how much memory the model needs — roughly half a gigabyte per billion at the compression most people use.

Source

Original publication

Record last updated 28 November 2025

The other direction

Looking at it from the other side?

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