TechCrunch: “After more than a year of planning and training, a volunteer-led project has produced an open source language model that they claim is as powerful as OpenAI’s GPT-3, but free and open for anyone to use (if they have the computing power). Dubbed Bloom, the model is available in open source along with the code and datasets used to create it. Brooklyn-based AI startup Hugging Face has released a free web app that lets anyone try Bloom without having to download it. Bloom is the brainchild of BigScience, an international, community-powered project with the goal of making large natural language models widely available for research. Large language models, or “LLMs” for short, can translate, summarize and write text with humanlike nuance — more or less. (See GPT-3.) But they’ve been historically costly to create, keeping them out of reach of researchers and firmly within the hands of Big Tech companies like Meta, Google and Microsoft…”