Thread by @Alber_RomGar

BLOOM by @BigScienceW is the most important AI model in the last decade.

Not DALL·E 2. Not PaLM. Not AlphaZero. Not even GPT-3. I'll explain why in this short thread.

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In 2020 OpenAI's GPT-3 came out and redefined the guidelines for the AI industry (NLP in particular).

Current SOTA language models follow the trends: Large transformer-based and trained with lots of data, using big computers.

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But what truly makes them belong to the same package is they all stem from the immense resources of private tech companies.

Their goals? Staying at the forefront of AI research, earning money --and, in some cases, achieving the so-called AGI.

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Like the other models, BLOOM isn't architecturally different from GPT-3.

What makes it unique is that it represents the starting point of a socio-political paradigm shift that will define the future of the AI field.

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+1000 researchers worldwide, across institutions like @huggingface, @mtlaiethics, and #EleutherAI are behind these efforts.

They make up the collaborative project BigScience and believe that open source, open science, and ethical values should be at the core of AI R&D.

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Values like openness, inclusivity, diversity, responsibility, and reproducibility are the DNA of this project.

BigScience and BLOOM embody the most notable and honest attempt at bringing down the barriers the Big Tech has erected around AI during these years.

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@Meta, @Google, and @OpenAI have recently adopted open-source practices. But it's the foundations behind BigScience that make it stand out.

Tech companies can't represent those values by definition.

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Also, doing open-source under the pressure of circumstances is not the same as doing it because you wholeheartedly believe it's the right approach.

That sets apart BigScience from the Big Tech.

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BigScience and BLOOM are the spearheads of a field on the verge of radical change for the better. We may be at the beginning of a new bright era for AI.

I explore the value and significance of BLOOM and BigScience more in-depth in my newsletter.

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thealgorithmicbridge.substack.com/p/bloom-is-the…