Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jul 17, 2026

BLOOM (language model)

The BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model (BLOOM) is an open-access large language model (LLM) released in 2022. It was created by a volunteer-driven research effort to provide a transparently-created alternative to proprietary AI models.

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Jul 17, 2026
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BLOOM
Original authorBigScience research workshop
ReleaseJuly 12, 2022 (2022-07-12)
Written inPython
LicenseBigScience Responsible AI License (RAIL) v1.0
Websitebigscience.huggingface.co
Repositoryhuggingface.co/bigscience/bloom

The BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model (BLOOM) is an open-access large language model (LLM) released in 2022.1 It was created by a volunteer-driven research effort to provide a transparently-created alternative to proprietary AI models.2

With 176 billion parameters, BLOOM is a transformer-based autoregressive model designed to generate text in 46 natural languages and 13 programming languages. The model is distributed under the project's "Responsible AI License".3

Development

BLOOM is the main outcome of the BigScience initiative, a one-year-long research workshop.2 The project was coordinated by Hugging Face using funding from the French government and involved several hundred volunteer researchers and engineers from academia and the private sector.2 The model was trained between March and July 2022 on the Jean Zay public supercomputer in France, managed by GENCI and IDRIS (CNRS).45 Unlike GPT-3, BLOOM was trained to be multilingual.36

The source code is released under the Apache 2.0 license. The model's parameters are released under BigScience's "Responsible AI License" (RAIL), which grants open access and reuse rights but with some usage restrictions.78

BLOOM was used in the chatbots BLOOMChat and HuggingChat due to its multilingual abilities.6

BLOOM's training corpus, named ROOTS, combines data extracted from the then-latest version of the web-based OSCAR corpus (38% of ROOTS) and newly collected data extracted from a manually selected and documented list of language data sources. In total, the model was trained on approximately 366 billion (1.6TB) tokens.910 It was developed using the open-source libraries DeepSpeed Megatron.3

BigScience then released xP3, a multilingual dataset for LLM supervised learning. It also released BLOOMZ, a variant of BLOOM fine-tuned on xP3 to follow instructions.11

External links
References

References

  1. "BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model". Retrieved 2022-10-01.
  2. Heikkilä, Melissa (2022-07-12). "BLOOM: Inside the radical new project to democratize AI". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2023-12-26.
  3. "AI goes multilingual with Hugging Face's BLOOM". VentureBeat. 2022-07-12. Retrieved 2026-05-12.
  4. Wiggers, Kyle (2022-07-12). "BigScience's AI language model is finally available". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2026-05-12.
  5. "Release of largest trained open-science multilingual language model ever". French National Centre for Scientific Research. 2022-07-12. Retrieved 2023-12-26.
  6. "BLOOM Finally Blossoms into a Multilingual Chatbot". Analytics India Magazine. 2023-05-24. Retrieved 2026-05-12.
  7. Le Scao T, Fan A, Akiki C, Pavlick E, Ilić S, Hesslow D, Castagné R, Luccioni A, Yvon F, Gallé M, Tow J, Rush AM, Biderman S, Webson A, Sasanka Ammanamanchi P, Wang T, Sagot B, Muennighoff N, Villanova del Moral A, Ruwase O, Bawden R, Bekman S, McMillan-Major A, Beltagy I, Nguyen H, Saulnier L, Tan S, Ortiz Suarez P, Sanh V, Laurençon H, Jernite Y, Launay J, Mitchell M, Raffel C, et al. (2022). "BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model". arXiv:2211.05100 [cs.CL].
  8. "License - a Hugging Face Space by bigscience". huggingface.co. Retrieved 2026-05-12.
  9. Laurençon H, Saulnier L, Wang T, Akiki C, Villanova del Moral A, Le Scao T, Von Werra L, Mou C, González Ponferrada C, Nguyen H, Frohberg J, Šaško M, Lhoest Q, McMillan-Major A, Dupont G, Biderman S, Rogers A, Ben allal L, De Toni F, Pistilli G, Nguyen O, Nikpoor S, Masoud M, Colombo P, de la Rosa J, Villegas P, Thrush T, Longpre S, Nagel S, Weber L, Muñoz M, Zhu J, Van Strien D, Alyafeai Z, Almubarak K, Vu MC, Gonzalez-Dios I, Soroa A, Lo K, Dey M, Ortiz Suarez P, Gokaslan A, Bose S, Adelani D, Phan L, Tran H, Yu I, Pai S, Chim J, Lepercq V, Ilic S, Mitchell M, Luccioni S, Jernite Y (2022). "The BigScience ROOTS Corpus: A 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Dataset". arXiv:2303.03915 [cs.CL].
  10. Heikkilä, Melissa (2022-07-12). "BLOOM: Inside the radical new project to democratize AI". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2023-12-26.
  11. "Crosslingual Generalization through Multitask Finetuning". ACL. 2023. doi:10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.891.