Aya 23: Open Weight Releases to Further Multilingual Progress
Authors: name: Viraat Aryabumi, name: John Dang, name: Dwarak Talupuru, name: Saurabh Dash, name: David Cairuz, name: Hangyu Lin, name: Bharat Venkitesh, name: Madeline Smith, name: Kelly Marchisio, name: Sebastian Ruder, name: Acyr Locatelli, name: Julia Kreutzer, name: Nick Frosst, name: Phil Blunsom, name: Marzieh Fadaee, name: Ahmet Üstün, name: Sara Hooker

This technical report introduces Aya 23, a family of multilingual language
models. Aya 23 builds on the recent release of the Aya model (\"Ust\"un et al.,
2024), focusing on pairing a highly performant pre-trained model with the
recently released Aya collection (Singh et al., 2024). The result is a powerful
multilingual large language model serving 23 languages, expanding state-of-art
language modeling capabilities to approximately half of the world's population.
The Aya model covered 101 languages whereas Aya 23 is an experiment in depth vs
breadth, exploring the impact of allocating more capacity to fewer languages
that are included during pre-training. Aya 23 outperforms both previous
massively multilingual models like Aya 101 for the languages it covers, as well
as widely used models like Gemma, Mistral and Mixtral on an extensive range of
discriminative and generative tasks. We release the open weights for both the
8B and 35B models as part of our continued commitment for expanding access to
multilingual progress.