// 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

Transformer local-attention (NesT-B)

🇺🇸 Google Cloud

May 2021 90.1M
Vision Open (Restricted)

ConSERT

🇨🇳 Meituan University

May 2021 340M
Language Open (Restricted)

MedBERT

🇺🇸 Peng Cheng Laboratory

May 2021 17M
Language Proprietary

Multitask Unified Model (MUM)

🇺🇸 Google

May 2021
Language Proprietary

Fairseq + UID: variance

🇺🇸 Google AI

May 2021
Language Proprietary

ADM

🇺🇸 OpenAI

May 2021 559M
Language Open Weights

ProtBERT-BFD

🇺🇸 Technical University of Munich

May 2021 420M
Language Open (Restricted)

ProtBERT-UniRef

🇺🇸 Technical University of Munich

May 2021 420M
Language Proprietary

ProtT5-XL-U50

🇺🇸 Technical University of Munich

May 2021 3B
Language Open Weights

ProtT5-XXL

🇺🇸 Technical University of Munich

May 2021 11B
Language Open (Restricted)

ProtT5-XXL-BFD

🇺🇸 Technical University of Munich

May 2021 11B
Language Open (Restricted)

Transformer-XL + SIS

🇺🇸 INRIA

May 2021 246M
Language Proprietary

GPT-J-6B

🇺🇸 EleutherAI

May 2021 6.1B
Language Open (Restricted)

ViT + DINO

🇺🇸 INRIA

Apr 2021 85M
Vision Open (Restricted)

SPALM + kNN

🇬🇧 DeepMind

Apr 2021
Language Proprietary

PanGu-α

🇨🇳 Huawei Noah's Ark Lab

Apr 2021 207B
Language Proprietary

DiffQ Transformer (16L)

🇺🇸 Meta AI

Apr 2021 247M
Language Proprietary

PLUG

🇨🇳 Alibaba

Apr 2021 27B
Language Proprietary

DLRM-12T

🇺🇸 Meta AI

Apr 2021 12T
Language Proprietary

Megatron-LM (1T)

🇺🇸 Microsoft Research

Apr 2021 1T
Language Proprietary

Transformer-C

🇺🇸 University of Massachusetts Amherst

Apr 2021 148M
Language Proprietary

GraphMS

🇨🇳 Dalian University of Technology

Apr 2021
Language Proprietary

TransfoRNN(d=1024)(2-layer) (PTB)

🇨🇳 Lenovo Research

Apr 2021 97.6M
Language Proprietary

T2R + Pretrain

🇺🇸 University of Washington

Mar 2021 668.9M
Language Proprietary

T2R + Random Init

🇺🇸 University of Washington

Mar 2021 450M
Language Proprietary

T2R 75% + Pretrain (WT-103)

🇺🇸 University of Washington

Mar 2021 668.9M
Language Proprietary

Unicorn

🇺🇸 Allen Institute for AI

Mar 2021 11B
Language Open (Restricted)

GPT-Neo-1.3B

🇺🇸 EleutherAI

Mar 2021 1.3B
Language Open (Restricted)

GPT-Neo-1.3B (finetuned)

🇺🇸 EleutherAI

Mar 2021 1.3B
Language Proprietary

GPT-Neo-125M

🇺🇸 EleutherAI

Mar 2021 125M
Language Open (Restricted)

GPT-Neo-125M (finetuned)

🇺🇸 EleutherAI

Mar 2021 125M
Language Proprietary

GPT-Neo-2.7B

🇺🇸 EleutherAI

Mar 2021 2.7B
Language Open (Restricted)

GPT-Neo-2.7B (finetuned on PTB)

🇺🇸 EleutherAI

Mar 2021 2.7B
Language Proprietary

GPT-Neo-2.7B (finetuned)

🇺🇸 EleutherAI

Mar 2021 2.7B
Language Proprietary

U-Net GAN (FFHQ)

🇩🇪 Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence

Mar 2021
Language Open (Restricted)

GLM-10B

🇨🇳 Tsinghua University

Mar 2021 10B
Language Open (Restricted)

GLM-10B-bidirectional

🇨🇳 Tsinghua University

Mar 2021 10B
Language Open (Restricted)

GLM-10B-unidirectional

🇨🇳 Tsinghua University

Mar 2021 10B
Language Open (Restricted)

GLM-2B

🇨🇳 Tsinghua University

Mar 2021 2B
Language Open (Restricted)

Very Deep VAEs (ImageNet-64)

🇺🇸 OpenAI

Mar 2021 125M
Language Open (Restricted)

ResNet-RS

🇺🇸 Google Brain

Mar 2021 192M
Vision Open (Restricted)

AraELECTRA

🇱🇧 American University of Beirut

Mar 2021 136M
Language Open (Restricted)

DCTransformer (ImageNet)

🇬🇧 DeepMind

Mar 2021 736M
Language Proprietary

Generative BST

🇺🇸 Facebook AI Research

Mar 2021 9.4B
Language Open (Restricted)

M6-T

🇨🇳 Alibaba

Mar 2021 1T
Multimodal Proprietary

ProteinGAN

🇱🇹 Vilnius University

Mar 2021 60M
Language Proprietary

RFA-GATE-Gaussian-Stateful Big

🇺🇸 University of Washington

Mar 2021 242M
Language Proprietary

Meta Pseudo Labels

🇺🇸 Google Brain

Mar 2021 480M
Vision Proprietary

Wu Dao - Wen Hui

🇨🇳 Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence / BAAI

Mar 2021 11.3B
Language Proprietary

Wu Dao - Wen Lan

🇨🇳 Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence / BAAI

Mar 2021 1B
Multimodal Proprietary

Wu Dao - Wen Su

🇨🇳 Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence / BAAI

Mar 2021
Language Open Weights

SRU++ Base

🇺🇸 ASAPP

Feb 2021 148M
Language Proprietary

SRU++ Large

🇺🇸 ASAPP

Feb 2021 234M
Language Open (Restricted)

SRU++ Large only 2 attention layers (k=5) (WT103)

🇺🇸 ASAPP

Feb 2021 225M
Language Proprietary

Linear Transformer (large)

🇨🇭 IDSIA

Feb 2021 90M
Language Proprietary

Linear Transformer (small)

🇨🇭 IDSIA

Feb 2021 40M
Language Proprietary

MSA Transformer

🇺🇸 Facebook AI Research

Feb 2021 100M
Language Open (Restricted)

DLWP

🇺🇸 University of Washington

Feb 2021 2.7M
Language Proprietary

top-down frozen classifier

🇺🇸 University of Edinburgh

Feb 2021
Speech Proprietary

CryoDRGN

🇺🇸 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Feb 2021
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.