Tendem
Mini toolsGopher
By DeepMind
Text
Gen 2
Overview
Gopher is DeepMind’s 2021 large language model, a high-capacity Transformer trained on a curated web and book corpus. It pushed state of the art on knowledge-heavy tasks, reading comprehension, and long-form answers, and it helped shape later scaling and data-efficiency work.
Description
Gopher marked DeepMind’s first flagship LLM release, scaling a standard Decoder-only Transformer to very large size and training it on a filtered, book- and web-heavy dataset to boost factual coverage and style control. The model showed strong gains on open-domain QA, reading comprehension, and general knowledge, with decent coding and writing skills for its time. It also exposed limits that later work addressed, such as arithmetic and step-by-step reasoning, brittleness under distribution shift, and safety concerns like biased or hallucinated content. Follow-on research, including compute-optimal scaling and data strategy studies, built on lessons from Gopher and influenced the next generation of models that traded sheer parameter count for better token budgets and efficiency.
About DeepMind
DeepMind is a technology company that specializes in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
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Last updated: October 14, 2025
