"They form part of a supercomputer that has spent 117 days gestating a new large language model (LLM) called BLOOM that its creators hope represents a radical departure from the way AI is usually developed."

"Unlike other, more famous large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Google’s LaMDA, BLOOM (which stands for BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model) is designed to be as transparent as possible, with researchers sharing details about the data it was trained on, the challenges in its development, and the way they evaluated its performance."

"BLOOM was created over the last year by over 1,000 volunteer researchers in a project called BigScience, which was coordinated by AI startup Hugging Face using funding from the French government."

"The model’s ease of access is its biggest selling point. Now that it’s live, anyone can download it and tinker with it free of charge on Hugging Face’s website."

"AI developers can use the model as a foundation to build their own applications."

"At 176 billion parameters (variables that determine how input data is transformed into the desired output), it is bigger than OpenAI’s 175-billion-parameter GPT-3, and BigScience claims that it offers similar levels of accuracy and toxicity as other models of the same size."

"Most big tech companies developing cutting-edge LLMs restrict their use by outsiders and have not released information about the inner workings of their models."

"Meta has already taken steps away from the status quo: in May 2022 the company released its own large language model, Open Pretrained Transformer (OPT-175B), along with its code and a logbook detailing how the model was trained."

"But Meta’s model is available only upon request, and it has a license that limits its use to research purposes. Hugging Face goes a step further."

"The group is also launching a new Responsible AI License, which is something like a terms-of-service agreement. It is designed to act as a deterrent from using BLOOM in high-risk sectors such as law enforcement or health care, or to harm, deceive, exploit, or impersonate people."

"The project had its own ethical guidelines in place from the very beginning, which worked as guiding principles for the model’s development, says Giada Pistilli, Hugging Face’s ethicist, who drafted BLOOM’s ethical charter."

"The reason BLOOM was able to improve on this situation is that the team rallied volunteers from around the world to build suitable data sets in other languages even if those languages weren’t as well represented online."

"Companies such as OpenAI have not released their models or code to the public because, they argue, the sexist and racist language that has gone into them makes them too dangerous to use that way."

"“But having one good open language model that people can actually do research on has a strong long-term impact.”"

"AI startup Hugging Face’s LLM BLOOM was trained on 46 languages, and Meta has been working on AI models that can translate hundreds of languages in real time."

"The next breakthrough will likely come from multimodal AI models, which are armed with multiple senses, such as the ability to use computer vision and audio to interpret things, Eck told me."

"The next big thing will be to figure out how to build language models into other AI models as they sense the world. This could, for example, help robots understand their surroundings through visual and language cues and voice commands."

"By adding reinforcement learning, which allows AI models to train themselves by trial and error, we might be able to see AI models with “the ability to explore, have autonomy, and interact in environments,” Hadsell told me."

"The firm Bot Sentinel, which tracks inauthentic behavior on Twitter by analyzing more than 3.1 million accounts and their activity daily, believes that around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1. That’s more than double the usual number."

"This tool lets anyone see the bias in AI image generators"

"A tool by Hugging Face researcher Sasha Luccioni lets anyone test how text-to-image generation AI Stable Diffusion produces biased outcomes for certain word combinations. (Vice)"