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Kolibri is an open-weight LLM from Aleph Alpha for German and English

Kolibri is an open-weight LLM from Aleph Alpha for German and English

tejaskumar__

Comments (146)

  • miellaby
    The paper explains absolutely everything as if it was a tutorial "how to made your own modern agentic LLM". They even tell how they made their dataset. https://aleph-alpha.com/downloads/tech-report.pdf ; It's the first time I see this level of openness.
  • tomComb
    For a post to make such a big deal about sovereignty it is a bit misleading to not mention that the company is slated to be merged with Cohere, a Canadian company.And that is a good thing - no need to hide it. Given the growing cost of keeping up, these few non-US, non-Chinese companies really need to do more sharing of efforts and costs.Canada too is very much in need of sovereign AI options, but funding that on its own would be pretty much a waste of money. Would love to see this new German Canadian company cooperate with Mistral too, or maybe one of the Korean AI companies.
  • niemandhier
    I think at the moment the main thing a sovereign AI model needs to be good at is auditing the results of other models.Right now one could run an open model for most government applications and it would be good enough, you just cannot trust any of these.So having a sovereign controlled model audit the first one would basically act like a “trust adapter”.If the second model is cheap and fast enough, there is a business model.You don’t even need to audit all the intermediate steps, just tool calls and end results.
  • spijdar
    The absence of any comparison to Qwen3.8 Flash, another MoE model with a small-ish (6B) number of active parameters, is pretty striking. Instead, it's compared with Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B, a model released almost a full year ago.I get that doesn't invalidate the real "point" of the model, but...
  • 9dev
    Aleph Alpha is just a sad joke by now. The talent isn't there anymore, they never managed to catch up to the other labs, failed to deliver on several projects, and by now are just a cash grab for the investors.
  • Lucasoato
    > 4. It thinks in GermanThis means that it’s always on time, it uses acronyms for everything and when there’s a decision to be made, it sets up a committee.
  • driverdan
  • martianvoid
    I just tried to play around with it on my RTX pro 6000 setup, it spends way too many tokens on overthinking stuff even if it’s able to catch the correct approachIts speed is pretty good on the other hand with only 3B active parameters I am getting around 170 tkn/s on fp8
  • sajithdilshan
    > It knows less from memory, Multi-turn tool calling is weaker, It’s not the best coding agentThen what does it good at? Sending faxes?
  • vzaliva
    "Languages: German and English" – this is odd. That means their dataset is limited. In my understanding, frontier models are trained on multilingual datasets and can combine knowledge no matter what language it was written in.
  • cheesecakegood
    For those sick of “Pareto frontier” talk, just shorthand it as “it’s the best at some very particular thing”. Obviously that one thing/tradeoff it’s good at may not necessarily be compelling, but it is either a loose sign of quality, or a sign that they’ve chased some tiny edge into the ground.I’ll be curious to see which it becomes in the next year - nba “very narrow record”, or a sign you can hang with the big boys.
  • mark_l_watson
    Looks interesting. I just went to download from HF, but they only have fp16 which won't fit on my Mac.Good to see Europe adding toe what Mistral is doing. +100
  • wingman-jr
    While it's not perhaps clear to me that this is a true Show HN, I enjoyed the writeup and it's good to see our German colleagues across the pond taking a good shot at this. I also appreciated the brief description on the Merlin-Arthur protocol - seems like a clever way to try to tackle the "I don't know" problem.
  • Jeeetendra
    3.5b active params sounds cheap until you remember all 78b still has to fit in memory. curious what the smallest practical self-hosted setup looks like for german docs.
  • erelong
    is this like an unfortunate name clash with KolibriOS (kind of like how Google Gemini was a clash with the Gemini protocol project)?
  • x1watt
    Was expecting that a "sovereign" AI model would at least use their own sovereign language (German) on the website as one of the options. Anyways, all the best and happy reunification day.
  • JaggerJo
    Is this a truely open source model or also open weights?
  • CorezIoOfficial
    Im surprised by how well this works. What is the difference from this and union alpha (other than the fact that it is open weights)?
  • pu_pe
    A blog post is not a Show HN topic.
  • Larrikin
    The name really evokes strong Kotlin library naming vibes.
  • woadwarrior01
    > A bigger dense model beats it. Qwen3.8 27B ...How is a 27B dense model bigger than a 78B MoE?
  • orifito
    At least Germany is moving smarter than UK government...
  • pythonic_hell
    The benchmarks are impressive given the problem space they are working in.
  • cbarrick
    I got distracted by that scroll-wheel UI component on the page. Neat!
  • rolymath
    This is not a Show HN
  • veryfancy
    Nice to see public goods in this space.
  • d2kx
    German here. We are cheering for Mistral, which is making some good moves before the year is over, and Black Forest Labs for non-coding. But that's about it.
  • anon
    undefined
  • ThouYS
    calling qwen 27B a bigger model.. I don't know man. My vram says otherwise.
  • api
    His point about regulation and innovation is great and I wish more people thought like that.One of humanity’s biggest problems here is we don’t know how to do moderation.We have two modes. One is a brick taped to the accelerator and damn all consequences, driven by national pride or corporate greed or egos. The other is a brick taped to the brake driven by histrionic doomers and anti-everything pessimists.The extremes are loud and fit in a tweet. Nuance is quiet and contemplative and usually requires an essay or a book. It’s also dynamic. Nuanced positions evolve over time as new things are learned. Extremes tend to be fixed and rigid. All this, I think, gives them higher memetic fitness in the discourse.I don’t think this is new. Look at nuclear power, a largely pre-Internet example. You had pro nukes who minimized and hand waved away any risk and anti nukes that wanted it utterly outlawed. Nobody said “hey this is a great zero carbon source of energy but we really need to think it through carefully and manage it well.” Or if they did they were drowned out by the loud screaming extremes.
  • hypfer
    The ignorant, hostile, negative, and, frankly, kinda racist comments here really are just a sad showing for the currently online crowd.But anyway. I think the main oversight when dismissing this is that not every use-case is coding a SV-style startup app. That market is quite saturated, so it would make sense to create something locally for the use-cases currently underserved by LLMs.We will probably learn more about what this can really do once quants become available that can be run by people without an SV salary (and the biases that come with that).
  • gilfoyle_7
    does it have GDPR compliance?
  • shevy-java
    Is Germany sovereign? It outsourced its defence onto the USA. Recently Trump wanted more diesel; Germany insta-submitted, also because oddly enough Macron submitted before Germany (Macron is suspicious). Before that, Leyen committed to insta-submission with a deal that made europeans poorer (and perhaps Leyen benefits from that). Canada shows the way. Many of the smaller countries in the EU too, such as Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, to some extent Sweden as well. Every time I read "sovereign" here I have to object. Nothing is sovereign here. The whole hardware is definitely not sovereign. Perhaps some of the software is, but that's about it. Plus, who gets all the data? The big US mega-corporations sniff non-stop. Remember how Facebook sniffed Libgen and Anna's Archive dry etc..., then suddenly libgen went down. The US corporations act as huge global leeches on every step of the stair. And lobbyists benefit from this too.