If OpenAI has struck a blow by democratizing ChatGPT, some French people can also boast of having participated in the development of another language model: Bloom. “We have taken a giant step in artificial intelligence in two years,” enthuses Pierre-François Lavallée in his office in Saclay, where he receives us. Two floors down, one of the most powerful computers on the planet – a supercomputer – has recently put its prodigious computing power to work to train Bloom. And the case was not easy. “We used a neural network of 175 billion parameters” specifies the director of Idris (Institute for development and resources in scientific computing, which depends on the CNRS).
If everything seems to point to success, then why has hardly anyone heard of Bloom, while ChatGPT takes up all the media space? How was this language model created? What are its characteristics? Find the answers to all these questions in our large video format.