GPT-3 175B (davinci)

Closed weights OpenAI 174.6B parameters May 2020

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
OpenAI
Organisation type
Industry
Country
United States of America
Published
28 May 2020
Authors
Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Sandhini Agarwal, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Gretchen Krueger, Tom Henighan, Rewon Child, Aditya Ramesh, Daniel M. Ziegler, Jeffrey Wu, Clemens Winter, Christopher Hesse, Mark Chen, Eric Sigler, Mateusz Litwin, Scott Gray, Benjamin Chess, Jack Clark, C…

What it does

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

Domain
Language
Task
Text autocompletion, Language modeling/generation
Approach
Self-supervised learning

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
174.6B

"we train GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters" Rather, it's 174.6 billion. Table D.1: 174,600 million parameters

Training data
238,000,000,000 tokens

From table 2.2, we determine that there are 410 + 19 + 12 + 55 + 3 = 499 billion tokens. We multiply this by 0.75 to give 374B words. 3.74e11 ======================== [Anson: I think the calculation below doesn't look at all the data, the CommonCrawl data only constitutes 60% of the data. Multiplying by 5/3 gives 4.75e11] "The CommonCrawl data was downloaded from 41 shards of monthly CommonCrawl covering 2016 to 2019, constituting 45TB of compressed plaintext before filtering and 570GB aft…

Epochs
0.6
Batch size
3,200,000

3.2M, per table 2.1

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
3.1 × 10²³ FLOP

Table D.1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

How it was established
Reported

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 Tesla V100 DGXS 32 GB
Chips used
10,000
Chip-hours
3,552,000
Wall-clock time
355 hours (14.8 days)

14.8 days according to https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2104/2104.10350.pdf

Hardware utilisation
MFU 19.7%

See table 4 of the carbon emissions paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.10350 MFU calculation from total compute: (6 FLOP/token/param * 174.6B params * 300B tokens) / (10k V100 * 125 TFLOPS/V100 * 14.8 days) = 0.1966 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%286*174.6+billion+*+300+billion%29+FLOP+%2F+%281250000+TFLOPS+*+14.8+days%29 HFU calculation from GPU throughput: The paper reports 24.6 TFLOPS throughput per V100, and reports the V100 peak performance of 125 TFLOPS (which is correct if trainin…

Power draw
5.1 MW
Compute cost
$2,116,866
Cloud vendor
Microsoft

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
API access
Training code
Unreleased

https://openai.com/blog/openai-api

How it is classified

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

Frontier model
Yes
Foundation model
Yes
Likely above 10²³ FLOP
Yes
Why it is tracked
Highly cited,Training cost
Record confidence
Confident
Citations
58,240
Benchmark data
GPT-3 175B (davinci)

Sources

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

Reference
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
Last updated
25 May 2026

What the numbers mean

About this model

GPT-3 175B (davinci) was published by OpenAI, in United States of America, in May 2020. industry is the category the publisher falls under.

It works in Language, and is recorded as doing text autocompletion, Language modeling/generation.

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

Training and provenance

Producing it required around 3.1 × 10²³ FLOP of arithmetic, on NVIDIA Tesla V100 DGXS 32 GB, which is a statement about the training budget rather than about inference.

Around 238,000,000,000 tokens went into training it.

It is tracked in the underlying dataset for one reason in particular: highly cited,Training cost.

Answers

GPT-3 175B (davinci) — common questions

01

How much compute was used to train GPT-3 175B (davinci)?

Around 3.1 × 10²³ FLOP, on NVIDIA Tesla V100 DGXS 32 GB. 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.

02

What GPU do I need to run GPT-3 175B (davinci)?

None. GPT-3 175B (davinci) 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

Is GPT-3 175B (davinci) open source?

No. GPT-3 175B (davinci) has not had its weights published, so it exists only as a service controlled by its owner.

04

How many parameters does GPT-3 175B (davinci) have?

GPT-3 175B (davinci) has 174.6B parameters. "we train GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters" Rather, it's 174.6 billion. Table D.1: 174,600 million 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.

05

Who created GPT-3 175B (davinci)?

GPT-3 175B (davinci) was published by OpenAI, based in United States of America, categorised as industry.

06

When was GPT-3 175B (davinci) released?

GPT-3 175B (davinci) was published in May 2020. Capability per parameter has improved considerably since, so a newer model of the same size is often the better use of the same hardware.

07

What is GPT-3 175B (davinci) used for?

GPT-3 175B (davinci) works in Language, and is recorded as handling text autocompletion, Language modeling/generation. Models frequently carry more than one of each, and the tags describe purpose rather than capability limits.

Source

Original publication

Record last updated 25 May 2026

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