HLBL

Closed weights University of Toronto 1.8M parameters December 2008

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 Toronto
Organisation type
Academia
Country
Canada
Published
8 December 2008
Authors
A. Mnih, Geoffrey E. Hinton

What it does

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

Domain
Language
Task
Language modeling

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
1.8M

"Except for where stated otherwise, the models used for the experiments used 100 dimensional feature vectors and a context size of 5." "The vocabulary size for this dataset is 17964." Embedding: 17964 * 100 = 1796400 Context matrices: 5 * 100 * 100 = 50000 Unembedding: 0 (tied embedding “while the matrix of weights from the hidden layer to the output layer is simply the feature vector matrix R”) Total: 1796400 + 50000 = 1846400

Training data
14,000,000 tokens

"The dataset consists of a 14 million word training set"

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
Highly cited
Record confidence
Confident

Sources

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

Reference
A Scalable Hierarchical Distributed Language Model
Last updated
28 November 2025

What the numbers mean

What this model is

HLBL was published by University of Toronto, in Canada, in December 2008. The organisation is categorised as academia.

It works in Language, and is recorded as doing language modeling.

Because the weights are not available, none of the hardware figures elsewhere on this site apply to it.

How it was trained

It was trained on about 14,000,000 tokens of text.

The reason it appears in this catalogue at all is highly cited.

Answers

HLBL — common questions

01

What is HLBL used for?

HLBL works in Language, and is recorded as handling language modeling. Models frequently carry more than one of each, and the tags describe purpose rather than capability limits.

02

What GPU do I need to run HLBL?

None. HLBL 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 HLBL open source?

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

04

How many parameters does HLBL have?

HLBL has 1.8M parameters. "Except for where stated otherwise, the models used for the experiments used 100 dimensional feature vectors and a context size of 5." "The vocabulary size for this dataset is 17964." Embedding: 17964 * 100 = 1796400 Context matrices: 5 * 100 * 100 = 50000 Unembedding: 0 (tied embedding “while the matrix of weights from the hidden layer to the output layer is simply the feature vector matrix R”) Total: 1796400 + 50000 = 1846400. 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 HLBL?

HLBL was published by University of Toronto, based in Canada, categorised as academia.

06

When was HLBL released?

HLBL was published in December 2008. Capability per parameter has improved considerably since, so a newer model of the same size is often the better use of the same hardware.

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.