AI Glossary
Weights
What is Weights?
The numerical parameters of a neural network that encode the knowledge learned during training. 'Model weights' and 'model parameters' are often used interchangeably. Releasing model weights publicly (open-weights models) allows others to run and fine-tune the model locally.
Example in practice
When Meta releases Llama model weights publicly, an enterprise can download and host them on their own servers — owning the full model and keeping all inference data private, unlike cloud API approaches.