BLOOM (2022) › 2022: BLOOM

The release of BLOOM (BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model) in 2022 marked a historic milestone in the democratization of large language model research, representing the first time a model of that scale (176 billion parameters) was made openly available to researchers and the public as an alternative to proprietary LLMs. Developed by the BigScience collaboration, a diverse international team of over 1000 researchers from more than 70 countries, BLOOM demonstrated that open, collaborative approaches to AI research could produce state-of-the-art language models while ensuring broader access and transparency. The model's multilingual capabilities, supporting 46 languages and 13 programming languages, represented a significant advance in inclusive AI development, addressing the bias toward English-centric models that had characterized much of the field. By releasing the model and documenting its development, BigScience expanded access to large-scale AI research and established new open-science practices.