BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

TL;DR

BLOOM is a large, open-access multilingual language model with 176 billion parameters, designed to democratize access to advanced NLP technology and achieve competitive performance across diverse tasks.

Contribution

This work introduces BLOOM, a 176B-parameter multilingual language model developed through a collaborative effort, and emphasizes open access and multilingual capabilities.

Findings

BLOOM achieves competitive benchmark performance.

Multitask prompted finetuning improves results.

Models and code are publicly released.

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.