LightOn releases PAGnol, the largest French Language Model

PARIS, France, May 4th, 2021 — Paris-based startup LightOn, maker of photonic co-processors for large-scale AI, unveils today PAGnol, a 1.5 billion parameter language model. PAGnol is a collection of large French language models, geared towards free-form text generation — with PAG standing for pré-apprentissage génératif. With 1.5 billion parameters, PAGnol-XL is the largest model trained to date for the French language. PAGnol is based on the GPT architecture and uses scaling laws predictions for efficient training.

PAGnol is the first language model trained by LightOn, in cooperation with the ALMAnaCH team of Inria Paris, and used the JeanZay supercomputer through a GENCI allocation. Increasingly more powerful models will follow, leveraging LightOn’s massively parallel photonics hardware to boost training and inference.

Igor Carron, LightOn’s CEO, declared about the release of PAGnol:

“For LightOn, PAGnol and subsequent larger language models strengthen our know-how toward trillion parameter models. Transformative AI such as OpenAI GPT-3 and similar models are starting to blossom with huge economic promises while stressing global silicon capabilities. LightOn’s technology will be key in future infrastructures for training and inference of these extreme-scale models. “

LightOn encourages further research on PAGnol zero-shot abilities as well as the investigation of bias and fairness issues.

PAGnol demo site: https://pagnol.lighton.ai/

Technical site: https://lair.lighton.ai/pagnol/

About LightOn

LightOn provides high-performance Photonic Computing for Large Scale Transformative AI. Its groundbreaking technology unlocks Machine Learning models orders of magnitude larger than state-of-the-art, by re-imagining the whole hardware and algorithmic stack. LightOn’s technology is currently available to a large community of users (Data Scientists, Machine Learning scientists and engineers) through the LightOn Cloud or on-premises with the LightOn Appliance. Founded in 2016, LightOn is funded by Anorak Ventures and Quantonation.

Contact Information: contact@lighton.ai

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