Flamingo

Closed weights DeepMind 80B parameters April 2022

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
DeepMind
Organisation type
Industry
Country
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Published
29 April 2022
Authors
Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Jeff Donahue, Pauline Luc, Antoine Miech, Iain Barr, Yana Hasson, Karel Lenc, Arthur Mensch, Katie Millican, Malcolm Reynolds, Roman Ring, Eliza Rutherford, Serkan Cabi, Tengda Han, Zhitao Gong, Sina Samangooei, Marianne Monteiro, Jacob Menick, Sebastian Borgeaud, Andrew Brock, Aida Nematzadeh, Sahand Sharifzadeh, Mikolaj Binkowski, Ricardo Barreira, Oriol Vinyals, Andrew Zi…

What it does

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

Domain
Multimodal, Vision, Language, Video
Task
Visual question answering, Image captioning
Approach
Supervised
Base model
Chinchilla
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
80B

"We obtain three models, Flamingo-3B, Flamingo-9B and Flamingo-80B" " The Flamingo-80B model builds on top of the frozen Chinchilla 70B language model [42]. Starting from the very first layer and before every seventh transformer blocks, we add a GATED XATTN-DENSE layer attending to the visual inputs; this accounts for 10B additional learned parameters. For simplicity, we refer to this model as simply Flamingo throughout the paper"

Training data
458,333,333,333 tokens

Flamingo was trained on a mixture of web-scraped datasets: 43M pages of text with interleaved images (MultiModal MassiveWeb dataset) 312M image-text pairs (LTIP dataset) 27M video-text pairs (VTP dataset) 1.8B image-alt text pairs (ALIGN dataset) Training dataset size is at least 2.1 billion.

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
2.2 × 10²³ FLOP

1536 TPU v4 chips for 15 days. Assuming 40% utilization: C = 1536 TPU * 275*10^12 FLOP/s/TPU * 15 day * 86400 s/day * 0.40 = 2.2*10^23 FLOP "All training and evaluation was performed on TPUv4 instances. The largest model containing 80 billion parameters is trained on QUSV chips for 15 days and sharded across 16 devices." "All trained parameters and optimizer accumulators are stored and updated in float32; all activations and gradients are computed in bfloat16 after downcasting of parameters fr…

How it was established
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
Google TPU v4
Chips used
1,536
Chip-hours
552,960
Wall-clock time
360 hours (15 days)

1536 TPU v4 chips for 15 days

Power draw
1.0 MW
Compute cost
$183,423

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.

Foundation model
Yes
Likely above 10²³ FLOP
Yes
Why it is tracked
SOTA improvement,Discretionary

Figure 2 "For tasks lying anywhere on this spectrum, a single Flamingo model can achieve a new state of the art with few-shot learning, simply by prompting the model with task-specific examples. On numerous benchmarks, Flamingo outperforms models fine-tuned on thousands of times more task-specific data."

Record confidence
Confident
Citations
5,793

Sources

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

Reference
Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning
Last updated
25 May 2026

What the numbers mean

Where it came from

Flamingo was published by DeepMind, in the country recorded as United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, during April 2022. It comes out of an organisation categorised as industry.

It works in the domain of Multimodal, Vision, Language, Video, and is recorded as performing the task of visual question answering, Image captioning.

Rather than being trained from scratch, it is derived from Chinchilla. That is why it shares the base model's general shape and size.

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

Training and provenance

The training run consumed about 2.2 × 10²³ FLOP, on hardware recorded as Google TPU v4. That figure measures what producing the model cost, and has no bearing on how fast it answers.

It was trained on a corpus of about 458,333,333,333 tokens of text.

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

Answers

Flamingo — common questions

01

Flamingo— who created it?

It was published by DeepMind, based in United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, an organisation categorised as industry.

02

Flamingo— when was it released?

It was published in April 2022. 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

Flamingo— what is it used for?

It works in the domain of Multimodal, Vision, Language, Video, and is recorded as handling the task of visual question answering, Image captioning. These are the areas it was designed around; they describe intent rather than a hard boundary.

04

Flamingo— how much compute was used to train it?

Training consumed around 2.2 × 10²³ FLOP, on hardware recorded as Google TPU v4. 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

Flamingo— 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.

06

Flamingo— is it open source?

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

07

Flamingo— how many parameters does it have?

It has a parameter count of 80B. "We obtain three models, Flamingo-3B, Flamingo-9B and Flamingo-80B" " The Flamingo-80B model builds on top of the frozen Chinchilla 70B language model [42]. Starting from the very first layer and before every seventh transformer blocks, we add a GATED XATTN-DENSE layer attending to the visual inputs; this accounts for 10B additional learned parameters. For simplicity, we refer to this model as simply Flamingo throughout the paper". 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 25 May 2026

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