Sorry if this is a n00b question, but how does one go about getting a hold of the GPT-2 model? I know that GPT-3 is only available for consumption on a pay-per-use API model.

The GPT-2 weights were released by OpenAI when GPT-2 was released. (https://github.com/openai/gpt-2)

Around that time (since no one else was doing it) I released a wrapper to streamline that code and make it much easier to finetune on your own data. (https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-simple)

Nowadays, the easiest way to interact with GPT-2 is to use the transformers library (https://github.com/huggingface/transformers), of which I've created a much better library for GPT-2 that leverages it. (https://github.com/minimaxir/aitextgen)