What Parameters Are

In AI models, parameters are the numerical values that guide how the system processes information. They’re the internal “settings” that adjust as the model learns, shaping how it interprets data and produces responses. For example, GPT-4 is estimated to have hundreds of billions of parameters working together to predict words and generate text.

Two Key Types of Parameters

Construction Parameters – These define the model’s architecture: how layers of artificial neurons are arranged, connected, and weighted. Think of them as the blueprint or skeleton that gives the model its structure.
Behavior Parameters – These govern how the model acts when given input. They control responsiveness, adaptability, and output style. Behavior parameters influence whether a model gives concise answers, creative dialogue, or factual recall, depending on the data it receives and how it’s connected to external sources.

How Parameters Learn and Why They Matter

When an AI model trains, it doesn’t memorize data — it adjusts its parameters.
Each parameter slightly changes based on how correct or wrong the model’s predictions are. Through millions or even billions of these small adjustments, the model learns complex relationships between words, images, or sounds.

That’s why parameters are often called the “memory” or “knowledge” of a model. The more parameters a model has (and the better it’s trained), the more subtle patterns it can understand — like tone, context, and even emotions in text.

Think of Google Colab like a free online notebook where you can write and run Python code in your browser — no installation needed.

You log in with your Google account, open a new “notebook”, type code into a cell, hit run, and see results immediately.

What makes it really helpful: (1) It gives you access to faster hardware (GPUs/TPUs) for free, so you can experiment with heavier tasks than your
(2) Everything is saved in your Google Drive and you can share the notebook with someone else like you share a Google Doc.

Colab’s machines are temporary

When you open a Colab notebook, Google gives you a virtual machine (VM) that exists only while your session is active. Once you close the tab or stay idle too long, it gets deleted — including everything you installed or downloaded.
But AI engineers bypass that:

They connect their Google Drive and store checkpoints or model weights there (drive.mount('/content/drive')).

They also create setup scripts that reinstall all dependencies automatically each time the notebook starts (!pip install -q torch transformers datasets).
So every time the VM restarts, it rebuilds itself in seconds.

Colab gives real GPUs, but you have to manage memory smartl

yColab’s free GPU isn’t fake — it’s an actual NVIDIA card like Tesla T4, P100, or A100 (Pro + only). You can check which one you got with

:!nvidia-sm


iBut VRAM is limited (12–16 GB). So if your model crashes with “CUDA out of memory,” pros do this

:import torch, g
cgc.collect(
)torch.cuda.empty_cache(


That clears leftover memory.
They also lower the batch size (how many samples are processed at once) or use torch.cuda.amp.autocast() for mixed precision to save VRAM while training large models