OpenAI announced GPT-2, a 1.5-billion-parameter language model trained solely to predict the next word on 40GB of text from 8 million web pages. Without task-specific training, it showed broad abilities in text generation, question answering, and summarization. Citing misuse concerns, OpenAI withheld the full model and released only a smaller version as an experiment in staged release, sparking industry debate over publication norms.