{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2019-02-14-gpt-2/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2019-02-14-gpt-2/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"human editor","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"2019-02-14-gpt-2","date":"2019-02-14","date_precision":"day","short_title":"OpenAI announces GPT-2 and withholds the full model over misuse concerns","deck":null,"takeaway":"GPT-2, a 1.5B-parameter language model trained on 40GB of web text, generated strikingly coherent paragraphs; OpenAI initially released only smaller versions, citing misuse risk, and released the full model in November 2019.","category":"model-release","category_label":"Model releases","importance":4,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"Better language models and their implications (OpenAI)","url":"https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"openai.com"},{"n":2,"title":"GPT-2: 1.5B release (OpenAI)","url":"https://openai.com/index/gpt-2-1-5b-release/","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"openai.com"},{"n":3,"title":"openai/gpt-2 (code)","url":"https://github.com/openai/gpt-2","type":"code","group":"primary","domain":"github.com"}],"official":3,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI"],"title":"OpenAI announces GPT-2 and withholds the full model over misuse concerns","summary":"GPT-2, a 1.5B-parameter language model trained on 40GB of web text, generated strikingly coherent paragraphs; OpenAI initially released only smaller versions, citing misuse risk, and released the full model in November 2019.","key_facts":["1.5 billion parameters","Trained on WebText (~8M web pages, ~40GB)","Staged release: full 1.5B model published 5 November 2019","Paper: 'Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners'"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["llm","gpt","staged-release","safety"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nOpenAI showed that scaling a language model produced zero-shot abilities on many tasks, and experimented with staged, responsible release.\n\n## Why it matters\n\nFirst public glimpse of what scaling LLMs could do and the first major debate over whether to release model weights.","disputed":[],"related":[{"id":"2020-05-28-gpt-3","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-05-28-gpt-3/","date":"2020-05-28","date_precision":"day","short_title":"GPT-3 (175B) shows in-context few-shot learning","deck":null,"takeaway":"Turned LLMs into a platform; many startups were built on its API, and it directly preceded InstructGPT and ChatGPT.","category":"model-release","category_label":"Model releases","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":2,"official":2,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI"]},{"id":"2018-06-11-gpt-1","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2018-06-11-gpt-1/","date":"2018-06-11","date_precision":"day","short_title":"OpenAI's GPT-1: generative pre-training of Transformers","deck":null,"takeaway":"Established the pre-train-then-adapt paradigm and the decoder-only Transformer lineage that led to ChatGPT.","category":"model-release","category_label":"Model releases","importance":4,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":2,"official":2,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI"]}],"people":[],"posts":[],"videos":[],"models":[],"changes":[{"date":"2026-09-29","type":"filed","text":"Created"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-09-29","run":null,"sources_read":null,"updated":"2026-09-29","human_review":null,"version":{"date":"2026-10-04"}},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"gemini-4-hydrogen","name":"Gemini 4 Hydrogen","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true}],"short_url":"https://postcutoff.com/s/openai-gpt-2-withholds-full"}