LM-Design

Closed weights ByteDance,University of Wisconsin Madison 6.9M parameters July 2023

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
ByteDance,University of Wisconsin Madison
Organisation type
Industry,Academia
Country
China, United States of America
Published
23 July 2023
Authors
Zaixiang Zheng, Yifan Deng, Dongyu Xue, Yi Zhou, Fei Ye, Quanquan Gu

What it does

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

Domain
Biology
Task
Protein design

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
6.9M

"That is because LMDESIGN has 6.9M parameters while ProteinMPNN+CMLM only has 1.6M parameters."

Training data
811,080 tokens

Total tokens = Number of Sequences × Average Sequence Length Total tokens = 50,000,000 × 300 = 1.5 × 10^10 tokens Final estimate: 1.5e10 tokens

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
1.4 × 10²⁰ FLOP

1. Hardware setup: 8x NVIDIA V100 GPUs (1.25 x 10^14 FLOP/s per GPU) 2. Training duration: 4 days (345,600 seconds) - estimated based on 10 epochs over 50M sequences with 6000 residues per batch 3. Utilization rate: 40% 4. Final calculation: (1.25 x 10^14 FLOP/s/GPU × 8 GPUs) × 345,600 seconds × 0.4 = 1.4 x 10^20 FLOPs

How it was established
Hardware

Availability

Whether you can obtain the model and run it on your own hardware, which is what decides if any of the graphics-card figures on this page apply.

Weights
Closed — provider access only
Model access
Unreleased
Training code
Unreleased

How it is classified

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

Record confidence
Confident
Citations
46

Sources

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

Reference
Structure-informed Language Models Are Protein Designers
Last updated
28 November 2025

What the numbers mean

What this model is

LM-Design was published by ByteDance,University of Wisconsin Madison, in China, in July 2023. The organisation is categorised as industry,Academia.

It works in Biology, and is recorded as doing protein design.

Its weights were never published, so it can only be reached through its provider. No graphics card changes that.

How it was trained

The training run consumed about 1.4 × 10²⁰ FLOP. That figure describes the cost of creating it and has no bearing on how quickly it generates text.

It was trained on about 811,080 tokens of text.

Answers

LM-Design — common questions

01

What GPU do I need to run LM-Design?

None. LM-Design 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.

02

Is LM-Design open source?

No. LM-Design has not had its weights published, so it exists only as a service controlled by its owner.

03

How many parameters does LM-Design have?

LM-Design has 6.9M parameters. "That is because LMDESIGN has 6.9M parameters while ProteinMPNN+CMLM only has 1.6M parameters.". 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.

04

Who created LM-Design?

LM-Design was published by ByteDance,University of Wisconsin Madison, based in China, categorised as industry,Academia.

05

When was LM-Design released?

LM-Design was published in July 2023. Capability per parameter has improved considerably since, so a newer model of the same size is often the better use of the same hardware.

06

What is LM-Design used for?

LM-Design works in Biology, and is recorded as handling protein design. These are the areas it was designed around; they describe intent rather than a hard boundary.

07

How much compute was used to train LM-Design?

Around 1.4 × 10²⁰ FLOP. 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.

Source

Original publication

Record last updated 28 November 2025

The other direction

Looking at it from the other side?

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