mila-llm/gpt2-small
GPT-2 Small — FP32 for Mila
openai-community/gpt2, converted for Mila and published in safetensors format, at the precision the weights were released in.
622 MiB. It is the reference model in Mila's catalogue rather than a deployment target: the smallest thing that exercises the whole path end to end, and the only published model that is not quantized.
What this is for
GPT-2 is a base model — it continues a prompt. It was not instruction-tuned, so it reads no chat template, holds no turns, and calls no tools. Three consequences worth stating up front, because each of them is a design decision rather than a defect:
- The Mila chat harness refuses it, keyed on the manifest's
instruct: false. Chat renders turns and applies a template; a base model uses none of that. - The Mila Inference Server does not serve it. MIS speaks the OpenAI and Anthropic chat protocols, which are instruct-shaped.
- Completion is the mode it belongs to, along with the training path — Mila's
Bardsample trains a GPT-2 stack from scratch.
It is also the one to reach for when what you are testing is Mila rather than the model: 622 MiB resolves, pulls, verifies, adopts and loads in the time a 12B spends on its first file.
Files
Use
From the Mila chat harness — /model install works, /model load will refuse it, and that refusal is the documented behaviour above:
/model install gpt2-smallFrom the library:
ModelStore store;
// Pull once. This is the only thing here that touches the network.
const auto hub = makeDefaultModelHub();
ModelResolver resolver( store, *hub );
resolver.pull( "gpt2-small", std::string( kDefaultHubOwner ) );
// Load from the store thereafter -- no network, and no manifest fetch.
const auto model = store.locate( "gpt2-small" );Installing is a deliberate step, and it is the only one that touches the network. It verifies each file against the digest in mila.json and leaves it in a content-addressed local store; every load afterwards reads the store and nothing else.
No token is required — this repository is public and ungated.
Precision
FP32, exactly as released. There is no quantized build here, and the name carries no precision suffix for that reason: the other models in this catalogue are pre-quantized deployment builds, and this one is not.
FP32 is also what Mila's training path is validated against, which is the second reason to leave it alone. A reader comparing Mila's arithmetic against a reference wants the reference unmodified.
Modifications from the base model
- Repacked from the HuggingFace checkpoint into Mila's tensor layout, then into safetensors
- Tokenizer converted to Mila's format
- No quantization, fine-tuning, distillation, or other change to what the model learned
The file opens in any safetensors reader — shapes, dtypes and metadata are all inspectable — but loading it as a model requires Mila.
License and attribution
GPT-2 is released under OpenAI's Modified MIT License, Software Copyright © 2019 OpenAI. The full text is in LICENSE and travels with every copy, as that license requires.
The modification from stock MIT is a carve-out in the model's favour: the copyright and permission notices "need not be included with content created by the Software." OpenAI asks that GPT-2 be used responsibly and that generated content be clearly indicated as such.
Base model: openai-community/gpt2, © OpenAI. This repository is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI.
