BASIC-L + Lion

Closed weights Google,University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) 3.1B parameters February 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
Google,University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)
Organisation type
Industry,Academia
Country
United States of America
Published
13 February 2023
Authors
Xiangning Chen, Chen Liang, Da Huang, Esteban Real, Kaiyuan Wang, Yao Liu, Hieu Pham, Xuanyi Dong, Thang Luong, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Yifeng Lu, Quoc V. Le

What it does

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

Domain
Vision
Task
Image classification
Numerical format
BF16

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
3.1B

parameter count of original BASIC-L

Training data
tokens

The training run

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

Chip-hours
4,350

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
Open source

Apache 2.0 https://github.com/google/automl/tree/master/lion

How it is classified

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

Why it is tracked
SOTA improvement

"On vision-language contrastive learning, we achieve 88.3% zero-shot and 91.1% fine-tuning accuracy on ImageNet, surpassing the previous best results by 2% and 0.1%, respectively" "On image classification, Lion boosts the accuracy of ViT by up to 2% on ImageNet and saves up to 5x the pre-training compute on JFT."

Record confidence
Confident
Citations
626

Sources

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

Reference
Symbolic Discovery of Optimization Algorithms
Last updated
25 May 2026

What the numbers mean

Where it came from

BASIC-L + Lion was published by Google,University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), in the country recorded as United States of America, during February 2023. The publishing organisation is categorised as industry,Academia.

It works in the domain of Vision, and is recorded as performing the task of image classification.

Because the weights are not available, none of the hardware figures elsewhere on this site apply to it.

Training and provenance

The reason it appears in this catalogue at all: sOTA improvement.

Answers

BASIC-L + Lion — common questions

01

BASIC-L + Lion— what is it used for?

It works in the domain of Vision, and is recorded as handling the task of image classification. A model can carry several of each, so these are the areas it was built for rather than a limit on what it will attempt.

02

BASIC-L + Lion— what GPU do I need to run it?

None. This 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.

03

BASIC-L + Lion— is it open source?

No. Its weights have not been published, so it exists only as a service controlled by its owner.

04

BASIC-L + Lion— how many parameters does it have?

It has a parameter count of 3.1B. parameter count of original BASIC-L. 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.

05

BASIC-L + Lion— who created it?

It was published by Google,University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), based in United States of America, an organisation categorised as industry,Academia.

06

BASIC-L + Lion— when was it released?

It was published in February 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.

Source

Original publication

Record last updated 25 May 2026

The other direction

Looking at it from the other side?

This page starts from the model. If you already own a card and want to know everything it will run, start from the hardware instead.