Big Transfer (BiT-M)
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 Brain
- Organisation type
- Industry
- Country
- United States of America
- Published
- 24 December 2019
- Authors
- Alexander Kolesnikov, Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai, Joan Puigcerver, Jessica Yung, Sylvain Gelly, Neil Houlsby
What it does
The problem areas the model was built for. A model can carry several of each.
- Domain
- Vision
- Task
- Image classification
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
- 928M
- Training data
- 14,200,000 tokens
- Epochs
- 90
"928 million" stated directly in paper
"We train both BiT-S and BiT-M for 90 epochs"
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 v3
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
- 1,361
Sources
Where this record came from and when it was last checked.
- Reference
- Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning
- Last updated
- 25 May 2026
What the numbers mean
Where it came from
Big Transfer (BiT-M) was published by Google Brain, in the country recorded as United States of America, during December 2019. It comes out of an organisation categorised as industry.
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.
What went into building it
The training set ran to roughly 14,200,000 tokens of text.
Answers
Big Transfer (BiT-M) — common questions
Big Transfer (BiT-M)— is it open source?
No. Its weights have not been published, so it exists only as a service controlled by its owner.
Big Transfer (BiT-M)— how many parameters does it have?
It has a parameter count of 928M. "928 million" stated directly in 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.
Big Transfer (BiT-M)— who created it?
It was published by Google Brain, based in United States of America, an organisation categorised as industry.
Big Transfer (BiT-M)— when was it released?
It was published in December 2019. Capability per parameter has improved considerably since, so a newer model of the same size is often the better use of the same hardware.
Big Transfer (BiT-M)— 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.
Big Transfer (BiT-M)— 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.
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.