Deep Belief Nets

Closed weights University of Toronto,National University of Singapore 1.6M parameters July 2006

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,National University of Singapore
Organisation type
Academia,Academia
Country
Canada, Singapore
Published
18 July 2006
Authors
GE Hinton, S Osindero, YW Teh

What it does

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

Domain
Vision
Task
Character recognition (OCR)

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
1.6M
Training data
47,100,000 tokens

"The network that performed best on the validation set was then tested and had an error rate of 1.39%. This network was then trained on all 60,000 training images8 until its error-rate on the full training set was as low as its final error-rate had been on the initial training set of 44,000 images."

Epochs
330

The training run

What it physically took to train: which chips, how many, for how long, and what that drew from the wall.

Wall-clock time
168 hours (7 days)

"a further 59 epochs [of training] making the total learning time about a week"

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
Citations
16,071

Sources

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

Reference
A fast learning algorithm for deep belief nets
Last updated
28 November 2025

What the numbers mean

Where it came from

Deep Belief Nets was published by University of Toronto,National University of Singapore, in Canada, in July 2006. It comes out of academia,Academia.

It works in Vision, and is recorded as doing character recognition (OCR).

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

How it was trained

It was trained on about 47,100,000 tokens of text.

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

Answers

Deep Belief Nets — common questions

01

How many parameters does Deep Belief Nets have?

Deep Belief Nets has 1.6M 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.

02

Who created Deep Belief Nets?

Deep Belief Nets was published by University of Toronto,National University of Singapore, based in Canada, categorised as academia,Academia.

03

When was Deep Belief Nets released?

Deep Belief Nets was published in July 2006. 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 Deep Belief Nets used for?

Deep Belief Nets works in Vision, and is recorded as handling character recognition (OCR). 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 Deep Belief Nets?

None. Deep Belief Nets 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 Deep Belief Nets open source?

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

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.