VGG19

Closed weights University of Oxford 144M parameters September 2014

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
University of Oxford
Organisation type
Academia
Country
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Published
4 September 2014
Authors
Karen Simonyan, Andrew Zisserman

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
FP32

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
144M

Source: Table 2 https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.1556

Training data
1,300,000 tokens

"In this section, we present the image classification results achieved by the described ConvNet architectures on the ILSVRC-2012 dataset (which was used for ILSVRC 2012–2014 challenges). The dataset includes images of 1000 classes, and is split into three sets: training (1.3M images), validation (50K images), and testing (100K images with held-out class labels)."

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
1.1 × 10¹⁹ FLOP

Authors of "AI and Memory Wall" (https://github.com/amirgholami/ai_and_memory_wall) estimated model's training compute as 11,000 PFLOP = 1.1*10^19 FLOP

How it was established
Third-party estimation

How it is classified

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

Frontier model
Yes
Why it is tracked
Highly cited
Record confidence
Likely
Citations
111,439

Sources

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

Reference
Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition
Last updated
25 May 2026

What the numbers mean

What this model is

VGG19 was published by University of Oxford, in the country recorded as United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, during September 2014. It comes out of an organisation categorised as 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.

What went into building it

Training it took a computation budget of roughly 1.1 × 10¹⁹ FLOP. 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 1,300,000 tokens of text.

Its inclusion criterion: highly cited.

Answers

VGG19 — common questions

01

VGG19— when was it released?

It was published in September 2014. Capability per parameter has improved considerably since, so a newer model of the same size is often the better use of the same hardware.

02

VGG19— 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.

03

VGG19— how much compute was used to train it?

Training consumed around 1.1 × 10¹⁹ FLOP. 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.

04

VGG19— 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.

05

VGG19— is it open source?

The licensing was never recorded in our source data. We treat unstated licensing as closed, because an unrecorded licence is not one to rely on.

06

VGG19— how many parameters does it have?

It has a parameter count of 144M. Source: Table 2 https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.1556. 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.

07

VGG19— who created it?

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

Source

Original publication

Record last updated 25 May 2026

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