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distilgpt2: Self-Hosting & Deployment Guide

distilgpt2 is an open-weight text generation model.

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What is distilgpt2?

distilgpt2 is an open-weight text generation model, published by distilbert with open weights at distilbert/distilgpt2. LLM API does not route this model today, so there is no endpoint or code sample for it here. What this page does give you is the self-hosting picture: published weight sizes, the VRAM each quantisation needs and the commands to serve it yourself. Every figure is read from the public repository and refreshed weekly. At import it had 2,110,325 downloads on Hugging Face in the previous 30 days, under the apache-2.0 licence.

How to run distilgpt2 yourself

Open weights (apache-2.0), 88M parameters. Below: how much memory the weights need at each quantization, which hardware fits them, and the commands to serve it.

distilgpt2 VRAM requirements

Precision / quantizationWeightsFigureSource
BF16 (full precision)0.18 GBEstimate88M params × 2 bytes

File size = actual download size on Hugging Face. Estimate = parameter count × bytes per weight. Weights only — the KV cache for long contexts needs extra memory; the fit tables below add 15% headroom as a rule of thumb.

GPU requirements: deploy distilgpt2 on your hardware

HardwareBF16 (full precision)
NVIDIA H200141 GB1×
NVIDIA H10080 GB1×
NVIDIA A100 80GB80 GB1×
NVIDIA L40S48 GB1×

GPUs needed per variant.

HardwareBF16 (full precision)
AWS p5.48xlarge8× H100 · 640 GBFits
AWS p4de.24xlarge8× A100 80GB · 640 GBFits
AWS g6e.12xlarge4× L40S · 192 GBFits
Google Cloud a3-highgpu-8g8× H100 · 640 GBFits
Azure ND H100 v58× H100 · 640 GBFits

Whole-instance GPU memory; public instance specs.

Serve it yourself

pip install -U vllm
vllm serve distilbert/distilgpt2
pip install 'sglang[all]'
python -m sglang.launch_server --model-path distilbert/distilgpt2

Commands use the official repositories above; vLLM and SGLang expose an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

Not on LLM.API yet

We do not route this model through our API at the moment. Browse the models you can call today — most workloads have a close match already live.

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Not available on LLM API yet

We do not route this model through our API at the moment, so there is no endpoint or code snippet for it yet. Browse the models you can call today — most workloads have a close match already live.

Browse available models

When to Use — When NOT to Use

Use it if...

  • You want to run distilgpt2 on your own hardware and keep every prompt inside your network
  • The weights are published openly, so you can pin one checkpoint and keep it reproducible
  • You want to fine-tune or quantise the model rather than accept a hosted configuration
  • You are comparing self-hosting cost against a managed endpoint before committing

Avoid if...

  • LLM API does not route this model today, so there is no endpoint here to call
  • You have no GPU capacity: the VRAM figures below are the floor, not a suggestion
  • You want zero operations — serving, scaling and upgrades are yours to run
  • You need image, audio or video input; this checkpoint is text in, text out

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