2021 was the year of monster AI models

What does it mean for a model to be large? The size of a model--a trained neural network--is measured by the number of parameters it has. These are the values in the network that get tweaked over and over again during training and are then used to make the model's predictions. Roughly speaking, the more parameters a model has, the more information it can soak up from its training data, and the more accurate its predictions about fresh data will be. GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters--10 times more than its predecessor, GPT-2.