Posted by bastitx 12 hours ago
additional paper: https://tej.as/blog/aleph-alpha-kolibri
We have a lot of details in the tech report if you want to go deeper.
I’m one of the authors of model2vec, and working on training classifiers for this. I think model2vec could be better, but I haven’t had the opportunity to try this at scale. So if you did, knowing about it would be helpful!
That's what they call this and I think it's a pretty clear definition these days to people in the industry.
(This comment was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49943034, but we're merging the threads.)
Bravo team!
It’s seemed crazy to me that anyone thought these could stay closed or even SHOULD be closed source.
Open source LLMs "democratize" access to the "intelligence booster" that is AI. But while that has several benefits, it also has several downsides.
Humanity has the serious problem of being underdeveloped in the "spiritual" department. Ethics is often considered some sort of lifestyle choice, but it's actually the difference between order and chaos in a society.
Everybody being able to do anything means somebody will be able to do something you don't like. At an arbitrary scale.
edit: why is the parent rationale sensible for AI and not nuclear technology?
But the applicability and the ROI of LLMs for other use cases than coding is a lot squishier. Also correspondingly the risks are unspecific.
As for what to do, ethical disclosure of vulnerabilities provided a good framework for disclosing software vulnerabilities discovered with the assistance of LLMs. What is going to be novel and calls for our spiritual development in other domains?
It's very clear to that any specifics couldn't capture the risks, because the capabilities, including the risks, are one level higher than any specific techonolgy. It is the process of advancing technology itself, in accelerating speed, that poses the risk.
Here you are claiming that AI products are going to reach AGI or RSI in the foreseeable future. Of course you can't "capture the risks" with specifics because those are inherently unspecific futures. It's a bit like saying when we invent antigravity all hell will break loose.
I would believe those future risks more if there were a progression of risks. What other than finding vulns has those characteristics?
While being unable to judge whether you should in the first place.
What do average people currently want? They're taught, the most important thing was being rich. So they will ask their AI to make them rich. Most real life ways to get there are "sketchy" to say the least, usually downright unethical and anti-social, but US society turns a blind eye when the "Wolf of Wall Street" comes out on top and the schemes don't easily fit into average people's abilities of moral judgement.
-> Large parts of US society suddenly engaging in all kinds of "semi-legal/hyper-illegal" fraud schemes, at the expense of already saturated environmental and societal resilience. Guaranteed collapse.
Or, let's get rid of those pesky neighbors/wrong-colored people/annoying opinions? Again, "legal" is a pretty squishy concept and only really applies when you don't have the legal expertise to get around it. Now you can.
Or, look at the basics: what is "real"? You only "know" because you trust certain people and institutions. Generative AI can help with that /s.
It's not only about "building weapons of mass destruction". It's about doing the same shit as usual, but a thousand times faster/amplified. Look up poly-/metacrisis for starters. Going faster with AI when there's a wall in front of you isn't the best idea.
In other words, ambitious frauds have already explored all of the angles and bought all the ads. At worst, LLMs will create a few more successful but less ingenious frauds.
..or maybe the commenter did look at superhuman persuasion long enough to believe it would be best to channel those ever the same fear fantasies from the LLM through their account to the reader.
On a more serious note, just look at the doom premises here: "Large parts of US society suddenly going criminal" is from the movie "The Purge", I think. It is fiction.
The idea that generative AI takes away our ability to find out reality. ... I don't know. People write about that a lot, but it still seems very far fetched.
Maybe through some terminally online overconsumption, like with social media? I wouldn't know.
With new AI capabilities we will have to adjust, I am sure. Media, science, education and law are changing very visibly right now. Those p(doom) narrations just seem to be pre-IPO hype though.
It is just so so dangerous. That is why they want to go public and only want to care about optimizing for the next quarter ...right before breaking into AGI. /s
Wonder what safeguards Kolibri uses to prevent this? Or if they even can
But the alternative just seems… so much worse to me?
A select few groups gating access to the ability to do everything seems like neo-fuedalism in the making.
And to be fair even the gating that we do have (daybreak, CVP, etc.) is already being circumvented via keys being stolen and sold on the dark web.
Clearly not a "better" scenario. The real problem though seems people feigning helplessness? You can't leave society "to its own". You are part of it and go where it goes. So better start steering.
When access to AI gives you abilities you cannot use responsibly, you shouldn't have access to that. Just like you shouldn't be allowed to drive a car or fly a plane or command a rocket without proper guardrails, safeguards, prerequisites, etc.
"General" intelligence isn't present in humans, why does it need to be in AI?
What do you mean "cannot"? As in you are granted abilities that have no responsible use?
I don't think this is realistically a problem at all. It just makes certain types of research cheaper and less time-consuming. And, again, this is also a problem with the american services.
As is shown to us by filthy rich people every day.
Or did you mean the burglar in the fawellas?
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.
https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/bounding-hallucinations-merl...
What is the canonical interpretation of the song ‘Glass Flowers’ by Armand Uso?
"Glass Flowers" by Armand Uso, a track from the 1978 album The Art of Falling in Love, is generally understood as a melodic reflection on the fragility and impermanence of love. [...]
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Support_Virtual_Agent#Sys...
(for context, the Minecraft Support chatbot, aka Merl, had a meme because she kept saying "I don't know" to questions like "How to craft a diamond pickaxe".
Gemini: Here's a list of links to check
We as many other’s were curious to try and benchmark it.
On that note, as a small gesture of support, we’ve hosted and made Kolibri-1 free for anyone to try for the next few days.
No GPU. No setup. Just try it. tesseracted.com/kolibri-1-chat/
No, I'm not gonna do that, I asked you to do that Mr Kolibri.
Also feedback on that interface: It's very annoying while answering. It almost immediately shows a list of sources, which on my screen fill up all the space and then when it starts answering it keeps those in view but also scrolls down the tiny part of actual text its outputting but I can't scroll up to start reading from the top, coz it keeps scrolling. I have to wait until it's completely done generating its output.
Uses Brave search, the idea is to test how well the Model can decided when to leverage search or not.
What I couldn't tell but maybe you can tell us: it also complained that it couldn't read the full text as something was cut off. Is that because of the tool you gave it, of brave itself or is it the model?
disclaimer: I‘m part of the training team, happy to answer any questions
- Are there non-LLM approaches to the above task with the goal of achieving a non-hallucinatory agent?
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.
The costs of "keeping up" aren't really growing, on the contrary.
Also, once the Cohere takeover is complete will they still be able to use this "sovereign" claim despite being 90% owned and 100% operated out of Toronto?
Qwen models have solid performance on benchmarks and we're transparent about this in the report. We're just happy to share a European alternative in the small model space, where I don't think we can afford to be fully dependent on China. We also put a lot of effort into German language quality things that don't show up in evals at all (style, Grammar, German reasoning, etc).
Sovereignty is imho mostly about choice and control over your data. Cohere is no different on that front and personally I'm quite excited about what we will build together post-merger.
I’m most familiar with Canada, where sovereign is usually just an excuse to overpay someone connected for an inferior product with no strategic value.
The main problems with big corp AI are due to control of access in the first place and control of what they output.
When you make your industry reliant on such choke points, you render yourself the opposite of "sovereign" for sure. Having multiple independent suppliers at least mediates that.
What's so "not-sovereign" for an open-weights American or an open-weight-open-training-process Chinese LLM?
Do we also need sovereign Linux (maybe), sovereign Postgres (most likely not), sovereign Python (def not)?
Given your other comments I can see why it was banned.
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.
Since no individual buyer cares that much about geostrategic issues, it's almost impossible to get some random European company to think about buying anything other than 'whatever US or China' are making.
There has to be very concerted push to make a difference.
Legal mandates around sovereignty (be very careful here) could make a difference.
But there will also be market reaction: US/China companies will bend on some level and provide things like 100% EU hosted and even comply with some data source stuff.
The only real path is to be more competitive as a continent.
Or are we worried that open models send secret telemetry?
AI models act as a force multiplier for intelligence, in particular for generating information according to someone's wishes.
I.e. deepfakes and social media mis-/disinformation campaigns are a thing and having powerful AI allows you to do those at scales that can overwhelm society's resilience.
In general, even if you have "aligned" AI: aligned with whom or what?
Whom are you comfortable with lording as a some demi-god over you, dictating what to believe?
Those laws would not exist if European champions were leading the world.
"are you comfortable with lording as a some demi-god over you, dictating what to believe?"
Yes, Europe handed over all of the decisions about everything to foreign powers, now they have to enact regulations to try to constrain it.
Zuck et. al. make the investments decisions for Europe, by virtue of you all giving him the money and power to do that.
Stop giving him the money/power, then this regulation won't exist
You clearly haven’t worked in enterprise in the EU. Location of data processor is the first thing they check. That’s why every major cloud has regions with different offerings, not just for HA and redundancy
Yes - security concerns are now very real, but do not fall for this idea that anyone really cares about structural concerns.
Tons of EU companies are still selling crap to Russia, happy to look the other way wile the bear devours a neighbour, as long as profits are there.
What has happened is that Trump has given a face to the reality, and so companies are adjusting on some level.
But 1) it will be nominal 2) Trump will be gone and the impetus will fade 3) the conglomerates will react 4) modest legislation will mean ...
The can will get kicked down the road.
The invasion of E. Europe by Russia has not even caused defence spending or the size of Armies to change, doctrine is barely changing.
Nothing will make those beheamoths change other than other forms of structural concern.
The 'Riet of the Right' - partly due to collapse of Auto / China (among many other things) might cause some change. But the change won't happen until well after the damage has been done.
Brexit should have been an opportunity for institutional reform of the EU, but no - they blamed it all on populism.
Certain governing entities in Europe will try to move away from Microsoft, they will be pulled back.
There is hope, and certain champions can rise and causes pieces to collapse.
If SUSE had any true entrepreneurial whereiwthal - they would create a true consumer / prosumer / enterprise-user friendly variation and brand their flavour of Unix - and make sure that all Euopean governments us it exclusively, which would cascade into widespread use.
There are variations of insta, youtube, netflix that should all be Europe based that could 'theoretically happen' but it needs some structural impetus.
Things usually don't change. Usually there needs to be a collapse and re-order of the system for that to happne.
The people in charge just want to keep their jobs, their very high salaries, and protect their retirement, and will be happy to 'sell out' whatever other imperatives along the way.
Ending with a positive not - I would say current conditions mean the change is now 'plausible, it not likely' whereas before it was 'not very plausible'. So there's a candle, a bit of wind, but not a lot of tinder or dry wood.
I get that doesn't invalidate the real "point" of the model, but...
People follow the latest frontier lab models with great attention and migrate to the next big model on their subscriptions. Meanwhile these local models have quietly gotten REALLY good. It is not even an exaggeration. It has happened in the last couple of months.
"Local model you can run at 40 t/s on a gaming machine that is better than Opus 4.6" is way less exciting than "OpenAI IS DOING CRIME!!! OpenAI SOLVED NAVIER STOKES. DARIO SAYS GLM 5.3 BAD! SLOW DOWN THE FRONTIER!".
(edit: also... totally ignore that 27B dense column over there where Qwen 3.8 27B beats Kolibri on nearly every single benchmark. Why would I choose to run this model?)
What is the upper bound on the value of more intelligence applied to your problem domain?
Qwen3.8 27B scored notably higher in most of the provided benchmarks, including the German-specific ones. The only "downside" is that inference is much more costly and slow, since it's a dense model.
Qwen3.8 Flash-Next appears to usually "benchmark higher" than 27B, while remaining fast.
I'm sure I could dig up the equivalent benchmarks for Flash and do the comparison myself, but as far as inference goes, it's messy. Consider that Qwen3.5 35B-A3B scores higher than Qwen3.6 on some of the German-specific benchmarks.
So it seems superficially plausible that Qwen3.8 Flash-Next might not be "27B but faster" in the ways that are important for this model. Or it could just "be superior" in all ways.
Either way, I don't think an LLM has to be "the best" at anything to be worthwhile, necessarily. And I kind of distrust benchmarks on top of that, so...
Its speed is pretty good on the other hand with only 3B active parameters I am getting around 170 tkn/s on fp8
Yeah. It’s a German model.
You do not get to invalidate that.
People need to stop insulting my nation.
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If the people you're joking with aren't laughing, you're not joking with them but about them, which is generally seen as a bad move, and something that we actually wanted to leave behind with all the social progress and all.
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This really only happens because people (as all bullies) think that they would be free to do so, because the victims would not fight back.
(Un)fortunately though, the world now has bigger problems with genuine fascists, so neurotically cowering in fear and performatively saying "yes, punch me harder. Insult me more" can be stopped now.
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I mean look at it. By now, it's at least better, but the first 30 comments or so were "haha germany bad haaa".
That's a terrible showing for the platform even if you're not german. What value was offered? Who would want this.
We don't even need to talk about nations and identities to see that that was just noise.
Aleph Alpha Kolibri: How the sovereign German LLM works - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49943034 - Oct 2026 (162 comments)