As you probably know, "complexity" is a loaded term in computer science. Normally, complexity is measured in "big-O notation" and has to do with how solutions scale in time as the number of inputs grows. For example, this post discusses the computational complexity of convolutional layers.
In deep learning, however, competing neural network architectures are generally applying the same algorithm (back-propagation) to the same types of problems (e.g., ImageNet classification); the only difference is the architecture. Further, most architectures use similar computational elements (e.g., convolutional layers and linear layers). Thus, it is a convention to use the number of parameters as a stand-in for complexity. It is true that this is only an approximation: two networks may have the same number of parameters but require different numbers of operations. But it's generally a good approximation, given that different architectures generally have the similarities noted above, but can have sizes that differ by several orders of magnitude.
As a reference, consider Figure 1 in the EfficientNet Paper. They use the number of trainable parameters as a stand-in for "model size" and note that the number of parameters is more-or-less linearly correlated with runtime.
As for a Python function that counts the number of trainable parameters, this will depend whether you are using Keras, Tensorflow, PyTorch, etc. In Keras, this is one line: model.count_params()
. In PyTorch, you can calculate it from model.parameters()
as discussed here.