M4-50B

Closed weights Google 50B parameters October 2019

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
Organisation type
Industry
Country
United States of America
Published
11 October 2019
Authors
Ankur Bapna, Orhan Firat

What it does

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

Domain
Language
Task
Translation

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
50B

(sparse architecture) "By modifying the Transformer architecture through the substitution of the vanilla feed-forward layers with sparsely-gated mixture of experts, we drastically scale up the model capacity, allowing us to successfully train and pass 50 billion parameters, which further improved translation quality across the board."

Training data
tokens

25+ billion sentence pairs

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.

Why it is tracked
SOTA improvement

all evaluations are performed on internal benchmarks, I don't see any standard benchmarks

Record confidence
Confident

Sources

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

Reference
Exploring Massively Multilingual, Massive Neural Machine Translation
Last updated
28 November 2025

What the numbers mean

What this model is

M4-50B was published by Google, in United States of America, in October 2019. The organisation is categorised as industry.

It works in Language, and is recorded as doing translation.

This is a closed model: the trained values stayed with whoever produced them, and there is no local version to run.

How it was trained

Its inclusion criterion is sOTA improvement.

Answers

M4-50B — common questions

01

How many parameters does M4-50B have?

M4-50B has 50B parameters. (sparse architecture) "By modifying the Transformer architecture through the substitution of the vanilla feed-forward layers with sparsely-gated mixture of experts, we drastically scale up the model capacity, allowing us to successfully train and pass 50 billion parameters, which further improved translation quality across the board.". 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.

02

Who created M4-50B?

M4-50B was published by Google, based in United States of America, categorised as industry.

03

When was M4-50B released?

M4-50B was published in October 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.

04

What is M4-50B used for?

M4-50B works in Language, and is recorded as handling translation. 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.

05

What GPU do I need to run M4-50B?

None. M4-50B 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

Is M4-50B open source?

No. M4-50B has not had its weights published, so it exists only as a service controlled by its owner.

Source

Original publication

Record last updated 28 November 2025

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.