// RELEASE TIMELINE

Models Released in 2021

Browse every generative AI model released in 2021 — large language models, image generators, code models and more — ordered by release date. Compare their specs and rankings on our benchmarks page, or put any two side by side with compare. See also models from 2020 and models from 2022.

198 models

Vespa

🇺🇸 Technical University of Munich

Dec 2021 231K
Language Proprietary

ERNIE 3.0 Titan

🇨🇳 Baidu

Dec 2021 260B
Language Proprietary

Fairseq-dense 13B

🇺🇸 Meta AI

Dec 2021 13B
Language Open (Restricted)

GLIDE

🇺🇸 OpenAI

Dec 2021 3.5B
Language Open (Restricted)

LDM-1.45B

🇺🇸 Heidelberg University

Dec 2021 1.5B
Language Open (Restricted)

MoE-1.1T

🇺🇸 Meta AI

Dec 2021 1.1T
Language Open Weights

XGLM

🇺🇸 Meta AI

Dec 2021 564M
Proprietary

XGLM-7.5B

🇺🇸 Meta AI

Dec 2021 7.5B
Language Open Weights

Contriever

🇺🇸 Meta AI

Dec 2021 110M
Language Open Weights

HSO

🇺🇸 Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago

Dec 2021 345M
Language Proprietary

LongT5

🇺🇸 Google Research

Dec 2021 3B
Language Open (Restricted)

EXAONE 1.0

🇰🇷 LG

Dec 2021 300B
Multimodal Proprietary

GLaM

🇺🇸 Google

Dec 2021 1.2T
Language Proprietary

Engine-Base (NE)

🇺🇸 Boston University

Dec 2021 124M
Language Open (Restricted)

Engine-Medium(NE)

🇺🇸 Boston University

Dec 2021 355M
Language Open (Restricted)

Gopher (280B)

🇬🇧 DeepMind

Dec 2021 280B
Language Proprietary

Gopher (7.1B)

🇬🇧 DeepMind

Dec 2021 7.1B
Language Proprietary

CTR-BERT

🇺🇸 Amazon

Dec 2021 70M
Language Proprietary

Student of Games

🇬🇧 DeepMind

Dec 2021
Multimodal Proprietary

T-NLRv5 XXL

🇺🇸 Microsoft

Dec 2021 5.4B
Language Proprietary

GPT-2-Medium+Pixelfly

🇺🇸 Stanford University

Nov 2021 203M
Language Proprietary

GPT-2-Small+Pixelfly

🇺🇸 Stanford University

Nov 2021 68M
Language Proprietary

Quantized ADMM

🇺🇸 Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Nov 2021
Language Proprietary

Transformer LM + MinSen

🇺🇸 Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Nov 2021
Language Proprietary

NÜWA

🇺🇸 Microsoft Research

Nov 2021 870M
Multimodal Proprietary

Persia

🇨🇭 ETH Zurich

Nov 2021 100T
Language Proprietary

Florence

🇺🇸 Microsoft

Nov 2021 893M
Vision Proprietary

BASIC-L

🇺🇸 Google

Nov 2021 3.1B
Vision Proprietary

DeBERTaV3large

🇺🇸 Microsoft Research

Nov 2021 418M
Language Open (Restricted)

Swin Transformer V2 (SwinV2-G)

🇺🇸 Microsoft Research Asia

Nov 2021 3B
Vision Open (Restricted)

ESM1v

🇺🇸 Facebook AI Research

Nov 2021 650M
Language Open (Restricted)

A.X (Adot) 18B

🇰🇷 SK Telecom

Nov 2021 18B
Language Proprietary

EquiDock

🇺🇸 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Nov 2021
Language Open (Restricted)

ViT-G/14 (LiT)

🇺🇸 Google Research

Nov 2021 3B
Vision Proprietary

KoGPT

🇰🇷 Kakao

Nov 2021 6.2B
Language Open Weights

Masked Autoencoders ViT-H

🇺🇸 Facebook AI Research

Nov 2021 632M
Vision Open Weights

GPT-2 (AMPS)

🇺🇸 University of California (UC) Berkeley

Nov 2021 1.5M
Language Proprietary

GPT2+CoreLM+Fine-Tuning

🇬🇷 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Nov 2021 132M
Language Proprietary

NCP-VAE (CIFAR 10)

🇺🇸 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

Nov 2021
Language Proprietary

NCP-VAE (Celeba HQ)

🇺🇸 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

Nov 2021
Language Proprietary

CodeT5-base

🇺🇸 Salesforce

Nov 2021 220M
Language Open (Restricted)

Projected GAN

🇺🇸 Heidelberg University

Nov 2021
Language Open (Restricted)

S4

🇺🇸 Stanford University

Oct 2021 249M
Language Open (Restricted)

EfficientZero

🇨🇳 Tsinghua University

Oct 2021
Multimodal Proprietary

Scatterbrain

🇺🇸 Stanford University

Oct 2021
Language Proprietary

Eve

🇺🇸 Harvard Medical School

Oct 2021 15M
Language Proprietary

DALL-E mini

🇺🇸 Craiyon

Oct 2021
Vision Open (Restricted)

PMLM-large

🇺🇸 Microsoft Research Asia

Oct 2021 250M
Language Proprietary

WD+LR+M

🇨🇳 University of Cambridge

Oct 2021
Language Proprietary

base LM+GNN (WT103)

🇨🇳 Shannon.AI

Oct 2021 247M
Language Proprietary

base LM+GNN+kNN

🇨🇳 Shannon.AI

Oct 2021 274M
Language Open (Restricted)

GPT-2 (fine-tuned with HYDRA)

🇺🇸 University of California San Diego

Oct 2021 1.5B
Language Proprietary

MGK 4 heads (medium)

🇺🇸 FPT Software AI Center

Oct 2021 90M
Language Proprietary

MGK 8 heads (small)

🇺🇸 FPT Software AI Center

Oct 2021 40M
Language Proprietary

PAGnol-XL

🇫🇷 LightOn

Oct 2021 1.5B
Language Proprietary

KnGPT2

🇨🇳 Huawei Noah's Ark Lab

Oct 2021 83M
Language Proprietary

T0-XXL

🇺🇸 Hugging Face

Oct 2021 11B
Language Open (Restricted)

TOME

🇺🇸 University of Southern California

Oct 2021 220M
Language Proprietary

Yuan 1.0

🇨🇳 Inspur

Oct 2021 245.7B
Language Proprietary

Megatron-Turing NLG 530B

🇺🇸 Microsoft

Oct 2021 530B
Language Proprietary

2021 was another fast-moving year for generative AI. The models listed above span large language models (LLMs), image and video generators, code models and more, each with its own parameter count, context window, licensing and availability. To understand how the models of 2021 actually perform, compare their scores on our benchmarks page, and use compare to evaluate any two releases side by side.

Tracking AI by release year makes it easy to see how the frontier moves. Browse AI models from 2020 or AI models from 2022 to compare how capabilities, context windows and open-weights availability evolved year over year.