Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models

We developed four variants of the model, ranging in size from small (124 million parameters) to large ( 1.5 billion parameters). We chose a staged release process, releasing the smallest model in February, but withholding larger models due to concerns about the potential for misuse, such as generating fake news content, impersonating others in email, or automating abusive social media content production [ 46 ]. We released the next model size in May as part of a staged release process. We are now releasing our 774 million parameter model. While large language models' flexibility and generative capabilities raise misuse concerns, they also have a range of beneficial uses - they can assist in prose, poetry, and programming; analyze dataset biases; and more.