In January 2023 Cohere For AI introduced Aya as an emerging, revolutionary force, transforming the multilingual AI landscape through open science. Aya is more than just a language model; it represents a powerful movement with a global vision.

The initial chapter of this 14-month initiative depended on a unique approach to scientific collaboration, bringing together a diverse community of AI researchers, engineers, linguists, and language enthusiasts from around the world. By embracing open science, Aya addresses the limitations of traditional NLP research, which often focuses on serving a handful of languages, thereby hindering the technology's potential for true global impact.

The groundbreaking Aya-101 model and datasets were released earlier this year, covering more than double the languages of existing open-source models. With 513 million samples in 114 languages, from 3,000 collaborators, these datasets ensure that AI technology can effectively serve a diverse global audience. Since its launch, the Aya movement has gained traction and recognition for its technical excellence and social impact. It has empowered researchers and communities by breaking down barriers and driving innovation.

It has been meaningful to see Aya resonate with people around the world, including mentions and articles in The New York Times and The Globe and Mail. Axios described Aya as a potential solution to the limited “access to the powerful technology [of AI] for billions of people,” while VentureBeat highlighted that “by having access to [Aya] in an open release like this, third-party researchers can fine tune to the model to fit their individual needs”.

In May, C4AI launched Aya 23, 8 and 35 billion parameter open weights release. While the original Aya 101 was focused on breadth, for Aya 23 we focused on depth. The result is a powerful multilingual large language model serving 23 languages, expanding state-of-the-art language modeling capabilities to nearly half of the world's population.

In August, the Aya 101 Model Paper was honored with a Best Paper Award at ACL, 2024, a leading NLP conference, hosted this year in Bangkok, Thailand. We are grateful to ACL for recognizing our work, and to everyone who believed we could do research differently.

As a research lab, we’ve continued to explore multilingual AI, with new research in red-teaming and preference training.

Most recently, we hosted Expedition Aya, a six-week, global open-build challenge to connect researchers worldwide and support new multilingual research initiatives. In August, 20 teams shared their progress toward wide-ranging multilingual research including climate awareness, linguistics, and multimodal opportunities. Learn more about the teams that were awarded the top prizes in this endeavor.

Aya: powering a global language revolution