Some great multilingual models:


multilingual BERT 1/DistilBERT 1

XLM-RoBERTa
RemBERT 1
CANINE

These are all encoder-only Transformer models (great for classification, question-answering, NER,…).
CANINE is a relatively new model that is tokenizer-free, meaning it’s a character-level model and does not require an explicit tokenization step.
For summarization/translation/etc. (seq2seq tasks), mT5 is a great model.