LLM Reference

Chinchilla Models by Google DeepMind

Google DeepMindProprietary
This model family is considered obsolete. Consider newer alternatives in Related Model Families below.
2 models2022

Last refreshed 2026-04-15. Next refresh: weekly.

Details

ResearcherGoogle DeepMind
LicenseProprietary
Commercial useCommercial use: conditional
Models2
Released2022

Links

Website

About

The Chinchilla family of large language models, developed by Google DeepMind, was introduced in March 2022. These models are notable for their exploration of the scaling laws in LLM training. Uniquely, they highlighted that for optimal model performance, the size of the model and the number of training tokens should be proportionately scaled. For instance, the Chinchilla model with 70 billion parameters used the same computational resources as a 280 billion parameter Gopher model but was trained on quadruple the data, leading to enhanced performance across numerous benchmarks. This approach challenged the previous assumption that increasing model size inherently improves performance, emphasizing the critical role of ample data in achieving state-of-the-art results 1)23.

Decision facts

Best fit
coding
Capability starting point
Gopher 280B
Lowest tracked input
Not tracked
Closest related family
T5Gemma

Current Variants

Use-when guidance is based on each model's tracked capabilities, context window, release date, and replacement status.

2 in view

Use when the workload needs 280B parameters.

2022-03280B parameters

Use when the workload needs 70B parameters.

2022-0370B parameters

Release Timeline

1 release group
2022-03
2 current
Chinchilla 70B
70B parameters
Current
Gopher 280B
280B parameters
Current

Specifications(2 models)

Chinchilla model specifications comparison
ModelReleasedParameters
Gopher 280B2022-03280B
Chinchilla 70B2022-0370B