NederlandsParameter
A parameter is an adjustable number in an AI model. During training, billions of these numbers are nudged a little at a time; together they hold everything the model has learnt.
An AI model has to store what it learnt during training somewhere. It does not do that as separate facts or sentences, but as numbers: the parameters, also called weights. Each number determines how strongly a signal passes through the network. During training the numbers are adjusted slightly millions of times, until the model does its job well.
The number of parameters says something about the size of a model. More parameters usually means a model can store more and handle more complex tasks, but also that it needs more memory and computing power. The largest models have hundreds of billions to more than a trillion parameters, while a small model that runs on a phone has a few tens of millions.
Not every parameter has to take part every time. In a model built as a mixture of experts, only part of the network is used at each step, so a large model can still work quickly and efficiently.
Why it matters
The Chinese company Meituan released a model with 1.6 trillion parameters, of which only about 48 billion are used for each piece of text. At the other end are text-to-speech models with 31 million parameters, small enough to run on a phone. In between is a growing group of people who want to use large open models on their own computer. Unsloth helps them by storing the parameters of a large model less precisely, so that the model needs much less memory.
Articles about Parameter
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Thinking Machines Lab releases Inkling 2 Small, open version to follow after safety tests
The AI company of former OpenAI executive Mira Murati has started its second generation of models with Inkling 2 Small. The model is available through the company's own platform, Tinker. The company wants to release it next week, once the external safety tests are finished.
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Baidu releases large AI model ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, but not for Europe
The Chinese tech company Baidu has released a large AI model that developers can train further themselves. It is built to be fast and economical, and Baidu says it scores well in tests. The licence does not apply in the EU, the United Kingdom and South Korea.
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Small open AI model reads text aloud on your phone, without internet
The AI company Gradium has released Phonon as open models: small text-to-speech models that read text aloud with a natural voice, entirely on a phone, a laptop or in the browser. On a public Hugging Face leaderboard, Phonon is among the most intelligible text-to-speech models.
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Unsloth shrinks a large open AI model from Alibaba and, by its own tests, makes it more accurate than other versions
Unsloth has released new, smaller versions of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a large open AI model from Alibaba. By its own tests, they score 15 per cent higher on average than other shrunken versions. This lets more people run the model on their own computers.
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Xpeng's small open AI model locates objects better than GPT-6 Astra
Carmaker Xpeng and several universities have released GroundingPI, an open AI model that helps robots and cars see exactly where things are. On 34 tests it scores slightly higher on average than OpenAI's much larger GPT-6 Astra, according to its makers.
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Anthropic builds FlashProve: cryptographic proof of which AI model produced an answer
Anthropic has released FlashProve, an open-source research prototype that uses zero-knowledge cryptography to show which model generated an answer, without revealing the model weights.
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Chinese company releases free AI model for chemistry, trained on its own lab work
The Chinese company Deep Principle has released Hydrogen-1.0, an AI model for chemistry and materials research that anyone can download. It also learned from failed experiments in the company's own lab. The results have so far been measured by the company itself.
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Meituan releases LongCat-2.5: a multimodal agent model with 1.6 trillion parameters, trained on Chinese chips
On 2 November the Chinese company Meituan released LongCat-2.5, a large AI model that handles text and images and can carry out long programming tasks on its own. According to Meituan, it was trained entirely on Chinese chips and comes close to Claude Opus 5 in tests.
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Mistral releases a giant AI model for anyone to use, strong in coding and security
France's Mistral is putting Mistral Large 4, nicknamed Le Chonk, online for free: a model with a trillion parameters that anyone can download and, with enough computers, run themselves. According to the company, it is the best open model for programming and for securing software.
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Nvidia releases free speech model that transcribes recordings in 40 languages, translates them and recognises speakers
Nvidia has released an open speech model that transcribes, translates and shows who is speaking, all in one go. It uses only a small part of its computing power per step and runs on a single graphics card, without the cloud. For now, the performance figures come from Nvidia itself.
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Chinese AI model Kimi K3.1 Pro ranks fourth in independent leaderboard
Kimi K3.1 Pro from the Chinese company Moonshot AI ranks fourth in the independent leaderboard of Artificial Analysis, ahead of the newest models from OpenAI and Google. It improved most in independent computer work. Moonshot plans to release the model by 4 November.
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Free coding model for the laptop was largely developed by AI itself
The AI company Recursive has released Flint, a free AI model that helps with programming and runs on an ordinary laptop. According to the company, its own research AI did a large part of the work: a first step towards AI that improves itself.
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AI model designs working proteins from a sentence in plain language
Researchers in China have built an AI model that designs proteins from a description in plain language. In four trials, the result actually did what was asked of it: give off light, break down plastic, convert alcohol and help capture CO2.
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Mistral releases new speech models that understand all official EU languages
The French AI company Mistral has released Voxtral 3: AI models that turn speech into text and read text aloud, plus software to build a voice assistant with them. They work in more than fifty languages, including all 24 official EU languages, and can also run on a company's own servers.
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Large open AI model from DeepSeek now fits on a computer with 128 gigabytes of memory
DeepSeek's new open AI model is too big for an ordinary computer. The company Unsloth made a heavily reduced version that runs on a powerful laptop or mini computer with 128 gigabytes of memory. This costs some accuracy.
