How large are large language models?

Less a technical comment and more just a mind-blown comment, but I still can’t get over just how much data is compressed into and available in these downloadable models. Yesterday I was on a plane with no WiFi, but had gemma3:12b downloaded through Ollama. Was playing around with it and showing my kids, and we fired history questions at it, questions about recent video games, and some animal fact questions. It wasn’t perfect, but holy cow the breadth of information that is embedded in an 8.1 GB file is incredible! Lossy, sure, but a pretty amazing way of compressing all of human knowledge into something incredibly contained.

For reference (according to Google):

> The English Wikipedia, as of June 26, 2025, contains over 7 million articles and 63 million pages. The text content alone is approximately 156 GB, according to Wikipedia's statistics page. When including all revisions, the total size of the database is roughly 26 terabytes (26,455 GB)

better point of reference might be pages-articles-multistream.xml.bz2 (current pages without edit/revision history, no talk pages, no user pages) which is 20GB

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Wh...?

this is a much more deserving and reliable candidate for any labels regarding the breadth of human knowledge.

it barely touches the surface