Model reference · open weights
bloomz is an open-weight language model from bigscience. bloomz-3b (FP16) weighs 6.0 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
Summary of the bigscience/bloomz-560m model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.
What it is
| Released by | bigscience |
|---|---|
| Released | 2022-10-08 |
| Parameters | 559M |
| VRAM | 6.0 GB for the weights |
What it runs on
How much memory each request adds isn't estimated yet for this architecture. The weights need at least the cards below, plus room for the context.
| Card | Weights alone |
|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB | fits |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | fits |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits |
| L40S 48 GB | fits |
| A100 80 GB | fits |
| H100 80 GB | fits |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits |
| H200 141 GB | fits |
| B200 180 GB | fits |
Builds
| Build | Params | Precision | Weights | Smallest setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| bloomz-560m ↗ | 559M | FP16 | 1.1 GB | RTX 3060 12 GB |
| bloomz-3b (above) ↗ | 3.0B | FP16 | 6.0 GB | RTX 3060 12 GB |
From the model card
We present BLOOMZ & mT0, a family of models capable of following human instructions in dozens of languages zero-shot. We finetune BLOOM & mT5 pretrained multilingual language models on our crosslingual task mixture (xP3) and find the resulting models capable of crosslingual generalization to unseen tasks & languages.
We recommend using the model to perform tasks expressed in natural language. For example, given the prompt "Translate to English: Je t’aime.", the model will most likely answer "I love you.". Some prompt ideas from our paper:
Feel free to share your generations in the Community tab!
# pip install -q transformers
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
checkpoint = "bigscience/bloomz-560m"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
inputs = tokenizer.encode("Translate to English: Je t’aime.", return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))
# pip install -q transformers accelerate
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
checkpoint = "bigscience/bloomz-560m"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint, torch_dtype="auto", device_map="auto")
inputs = tokenizer.encode("Translate to English: Je t’aime.", return_tensors="pt").to("cuda")
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))
# pip install -q transformers accelerate bitsandbytes
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
checkpoint = "bigscience/bloomz-560m"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint, device_map="auto", load_in_8bit=True)
inputs = tokenizer.encode("Translate to English: Je t’aime.", return_tensors="pt").to("cuda")
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))
Prompt Engineering: The performance may vary depending on the prompt. For BLOOMZ models, we recommend making it very clear when the input stops to avoid the model trying to continue it. For example, the prompt "Translate to English: Je t'aime" without the full stop (.) at the end, may result in the model trying to continue the French sentence. Better prompts are e.g. "Translate to English: Je t'aime.", "Translate to English: Je t'aime. Translation:" "What is "Je t'aime." in English?", where it is clear for the model when it should answer. Further, we recommend providing the model as much context as possible. For example, if you want it to answer in Telugu, then tell the model, e.g. "Explain in a sentence in Telugu what is backpropagation in neural networks.".
config.json fileWe refer to Table 7 from our paper & bigscience/evaluation-results for zero-shot results on unseen tasks. The sidebar reports zero-shot performance of the best prompt per dataset config.
@article{muennighoff2022crosslingual,
title={Crosslingual generalization through multitask finetuning},
author={Muennighoff, Niklas and Wang, Thomas and Sutawika, Lintang and Roberts, Adam and Biderman, Stella and Scao, Teven Le and Bari, M Saiful and Shen, Sheng and Yong, Zheng-Xin and Schoelkopf, Hailey and others},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.01786},
year={2022}
}
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.
Benchmarks
As published on the model card: the maker's own numbers, not measured by AxForge.
| Task | Dataset | Metric | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coreference resolution | Winogrande XL (xl) | Accuracy | 52.410 |
| Coreference resolution | XWinograd (en) | Accuracy | 51.010 |
| Coreference resolution | XWinograd (fr) | Accuracy | 51.810 |
| Coreference resolution | XWinograd (jp) | Accuracy | 52.030 |
| Coreference resolution | XWinograd (pt) | Accuracy | 53.990 |
| Coreference resolution | XWinograd (ru) | Accuracy | 53.970 |
| Coreference resolution | XWinograd (zh) | Accuracy | 54.760 |
| Natural language inference | ANLI (r1) | Accuracy | 33.400 |
| Natural language inference | ANLI (r2) | Accuracy | 33.400 |
| Natural language inference | ANLI (r3) | Accuracy | 33.500 |
| Natural language inference | SuperGLUE (cb) | Accuracy | 53.570 |
| Natural language inference | SuperGLUE (rte) | Accuracy | 67.150 |
| Natural language inference | XNLI (ar) | Accuracy | 44.460 |
| Natural language inference | XNLI (bg) | Accuracy | 39.760 |
| Natural language inference | XNLI (de) | Accuracy | 39.360 |
| Natural language inference | XNLI (el) | Accuracy | 40.960 |
| Natural language inference | XNLI (en) | Accuracy | 46.430 |
| Natural language inference | XNLI (es) | Accuracy | 44.980 |
| Natural language inference | XNLI (fr) | Accuracy | 45.540 |
| Natural language inference | XNLI (hi) | Accuracy | 41.810 |
| Natural language inference | XNLI (ru) | Accuracy | 39.640 |
| Natural language inference | XNLI (sw) | Accuracy | 38.350 |
| Natural language inference | XNLI (th) | Accuracy | 35.500 |
| Natural language inference | XNLI (tr) | Accuracy | 37.310 |