Standards have shifted as well. Gpt2 used to be considered “large” but it is half the size of this. Oh and also Sam Altman said it was too dangerous to release. At this point I consider anything too big to run on consumer grade hardware to be large, but an exact definition is a little silly to argue about.
"consumer grade hardware" is a rather loose definition too, what with RAM on consumer devices being anything between 2GB (low-end phones) and >100GB (high-end laptops/desktops) these days.
"So it's a small large language model?"
"Oh yes, very small."
"How can it be small and large at the same time?"
"Well, it's small by the standards of a large language model."
"So it's large."
"Oh yes, very large."
"Large compared to what?"
"Small language models."
"And so something like ChatGPT, what would that be exactly? A large large language model?"
"Yes, precisely. An LLLM."