The group, considered an open-source version of OpenAI,[3] was formed in a Discord server in July 2020 by Connor Leahy, Sid Black, and Leo Gao[4] to organize a replication of GPT-3.

[11] In 2022, many EleutherAI members participated in the BigScience Research Workshop, working on projects including multitask finetuning,[12][13] training BLOOM,[14] and designing evaluation libraries.

[16] In early 2023, EleutherAI incorporated as a non-profit research institute run by Stella Biderman, Curtis Huebner, and Shivanshu Purohit.

[5][17] This announcement came with the statement that EleutherAI's shift of focus away from training larger language models was part of a deliberate push towards doing work in interpretability, alignment, and scientific research.

[17] While EleutherAI is still committed to promoting access to AI technologies, they feel that "there is substantially more interest in training and releasing LLMs than there once was," enabling them to focus on other projects.

[21] While they do not sell any of their technologies as products, they publish the results of their research in academic venues, write blog posts detailing their ideas and methodologies, and provide trained models for anyone to use for free.

[55] Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and noted critic of deep learning companies such as OpenAI and DeepMind,[56] has repeatedly[57][58] praised EleutherAI's dedication to open-source and transparent research.