Use of Project to Democratize AI

At a deafening 100 decibels, rows upon rows of black fridges vibrate inside the supercomputing facility of the French National Center for Scientific Research. They are part a supercomputer that has spent over 117 days building a new large language modelling (LLM), called BLOOM. This is an attempt to break with the usual way AI is developed. BLOOM stands for Big Science Large Open Science Open Access Multilingual Language Model. This is in contrast to other larger language models such Google’s Lambda (Google’s LaMDA) and OpenAI GPT-3. The model represents a new large language model (LLM) that is very transparent. Researchers will share details on the data it was developed, the challenges faced and how they evaluated the performance. OpenAI, Google and other researchers don’t have access to their code or models.

BLOOM was created by more than 1,000 volunteers under a project called Big Science. Hugging Face, an AI start up, funded funding from France, coordinated the creation of the project. Officially launched July 12. It was officially launched on July 12. Scientists and historians of science use the term “big science” to describe a series in scientific history that occurred during World War II. It is used to describe large-scale, often funded projects by governments.

The model’s main selling feature is how simple it is to use. Now that it’s out, anyone can visit Hugging Face’s website, download it, and play around with it for free. Users can choose a language from a list of options and then input requests for BLOOM to perform jobs like composing recipes or poetry, translating or summarising materials, or producing computer code. The model may be used as a starting point by AI programmers to create their own applications. These models are extremely rare. These models require a lot of computing power and large amounts of data to be trained. This is something that only big technology companies like Google (and most Americans) can afford. Large tech companies creating cutting-edge LLMs are careful about keeping outsiders out of their systems and don’t release information about their inner workings. This makes it difficult to hold them accountable. BLOOM’s researchers hope to break down this level of secrecy.

Meta has already taken steps towards changing the status quo. In May 20,22, the company released a large language model called Open Pretrained Transformer (OPT-175B), as well as its code and logbook that details how the model was trained. Meta’s Model is only available to request. It also has a licensing that restricts its use to research. Hugging Face is even more. The meetings which detail its work over a year are recorded. You can access the model online for free. Big Science’s main focus was to incorporate ethical considerations in the model right from its inception. LLMs learn from tons of data gathered by scraping the web. These data sets can contain personal information, which can lead to dangerous biases. This group created data governance for LLMs. It should make it easier to see what data is being used, who it belongs too, and it also sourced data sets that were not readily available online. Giada Piestilli, Hugging Face’s ethicist, drafted BLOOM’s ethical charter. It also made it a point of recruiting volunteers with diverse backgrounds and places, so that anyone can reproduce the results and make them available to the public.

BLOOM was successful in improving on this situation because it gathered volunteers from around the globe to build data sets in other languages. Hugging Face hosted workshops with African AI researchers to discover data sets, such as records from universities or local authorities, that could be used for training the model on African languages. Chris Emezue was a Hugging Face intern, and Masakhane researcher, which focuses on natural-language process in African languages.