BLOOM
The first multilingual open-access large language model, created collaboratively by 1,000+ researchers.
Overview
BLOOM is a 176-billion parameter multilingual language model created through a unique collaborative process: over 1,000 researchers from 70+ countries contributed to its training, funded by a large compute grant from French supercomputer Jean Zay. Released in July 2022 under the BigScience Open RAIL-M licence, it was the first LLM with parameters comparable to GPT-3 to be made freely and openly available.
BLOOM supports 46 natural languages and 13 programming languages, with particularly strong coverage of African and Asian languages that are underrepresented in most commercial models. The training corpus (ROOTS) was carefully curated with explicit attention to multilingual diversity and documentation quality.
While BLOOM has been surpassed in capability by later open-source models like Llama 3 and Mistral, it remains historically significant as the first truly community-created frontier-scale LLM. It is actively used in research studying multilingual model behaviour and in applications requiring the specific languages it covers that other models handle poorly.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 8 May 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
Use cases
ASEAN Perspective
BLOOM in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
BLOOM is the 176-billion-parameter multilingual large language model produced by the BigScience open-science collaboration, a landmark for transparent, openly governed AI and notable for its broad multilingual and multi-script coverage at release. It remains important for researchers studying open-model development and multilingual NLP.
Released in 2022, it is now outperformed by newer open models on most tasks and is resource-heavy to run, so it is rarely the right choice for new production work. It suits academics and multilingual NLP researchers; builders wanting current capability should pick a modern open model. Freely available weights mean ASEAN use is unconstrained, though there is no managed API or commercial support.
Notable facts
- BLOOM was trained using the equivalent computational resources of 360 tonnes of CO2 emissions — for which BigScience purchased carbon offsets, making it one of the first 'carbon-neutral' LLMs.
- Over 1,000 researchers from 250+ institutions contributed to BLOOM's training, making it the most collaborative single AI model ever created.
- BLOOM supports languages including Swahili, Nigerian Pidgin, and Catalan that are entirely absent from most commercial LLMs.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including BLOOM's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with BLOOM unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
For the latest details, please refer to BLOOM directly →
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