BigScience releases BLOOM with 176 billion parameters

The BigScience collective, hundreds of volunteer researchers coordinated around Hugging Face and using France’s Jean Zay supercomputer, released BLOOM on 12 July 2022. The 176-billion-parameter model wrote 46 natural languages and 13 programming languages.

Why it mattered BLOOM’s full weights were published for download under a Responsible AI License, making it the largest openly downloadable language model at the time and a counterpart to closed systems.