What is weight? Model weights are the adjustable numerical parameters inside a machine learning model that are fine-tuned during training to improve performance, analogous to ingredient amounts in a recipe. Downloading model weights from platforms like Hugging Face provides the learned settings rather than an untrained model. I think you probably mean model weights … : A simple way to picture it might be a huge recipe. A model has an enormous number of numerical “amounts” inside it. During training https://docs.pytorch.org/tutorials/beginner/basics/optimization tutorial.html , those amounts are adjusted little by little depending on how well the model is doing. Those adjustable numbers are its parameters , and many of them are weights . So when you see something like “ download/load the model weights https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/models ” on Hugging Face, it basically means getting those learned numerical settings instead of starting with an untrained model.