SwitchTransformer

Google · 2021 · LLM · USA

A to Z

A · App: No
B · Built By: Google
C · CEO & Politics: Sundar Pichai — Centrist / historically bipartisan
D · Date: 2021
E · Expertise: Intermediate+
F · Free Tier: Yes
G · Generates: Text only
H · Deployment: Cloud + Local (open weights)
I · Inputs: Text
J · Jurisdiction: USA
K · Key Staffers: Jeff Dean (Chief Scientist), Sundar Pichai (CEO Alphabet)
L · Languages: English-primary
M · Model Type: LLM
N · Safety Issues: None reported
O · Open Source: Yes — open weights
P · Pricing: Free (open weights, Apache 2.0)
Q · AIDb Rating: 6/10 · AIDb v2.0 (rule-based): Capability 6/10 · Currency 4/10 · Access 9/10 · Significance 7/10 → 6.2
R · What Makes It Special: Google's Switch Transformer, a sparsely activated mixture-of-experts Transformer with a simplified routing algorithm that lowers communication and compute costs and can be trained in bfloat16; versions based on T5-Base and T5-Large pretrained up to 7x faster with the same compute, and trillion-parameter models trained on the C4 corpus reached a 4x speedup over T5-XXL.
S · Stock / Status: $344 (GOOGL, Sep 25, 2026)
T · Training Cutoff: [UNKNOWN]
U · Users: [UNKNOWN]
V · Voice Chat: No
W · Weights: Downloadable
X · X Handle: @Google
Y · Year Founded: [UNKNOWN]
Z · Bottom Line: Open-weights LLM from Google, released 2021.

Data completeness 88% · Last verified 2026-05-12 · Primary source ↗

“SwitchTransformer.” AIDb — The AI Database. Verified 2026-05-12. https://theaidatabase.com/m/switchtransformer.html