Cohere launches open weights AI model Aya 23 with support for nearly two dozen languages

Today, Cohere for AI (C4AI), the non-profit research arm of Canadian enterprise AI startup Cohere, announced the open weights release of Aya 23, a new family of state-of-the-art multilingual language models. Available in 8B and 35B parameter variants (parameters refer to the strength of connections between artificial neurons in an AI model, with more generally denoting a more powerful and capable model). Aya 23 comes as the latest work under C4AI’s Aya initiative that aims to deliver strong multilingual capabilities. Notably, C4AI has open sourced Aya 23’s weights. These are a type of parameter within an LLM, and are ultimately numbers within an AI model’s underlying neural network that allow it determine how to handle data inputs and what to output. By having access to them in an open release like this, third-party researchers can fine tune to the model to fit their individual needs. At the same time, it falls short of a full open source release — wherein the training data and underlying architecture would also be released. But it is still extremely permissive and flexible, on the order of Meta’s Llama models. Aya 23 builds on the original model Aya 101 and serves 23 languages. This includes Arabic, Chinese (simplified & traditional), Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese According to Cohere for AI, the models expand state-of-the-art language modeling capabilities to nearly half of the world’s population and outperform not just Aya 101, but also other open models like Google’s Gemma and Mistral’s various open source models, with higher-quality responses across the languages it covers.

Full story : AI startup Cohere’s nonprofit research arm Cohere for AI open sources the weights of Aya 23, a family of multilingual 8B- and 35B-parameter language models.