Qwen3.8 27B beats Kolibri 79.9 vs 70.8 in German in Kolibri's harness on Kolibri's benchmark.
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?
Well, it's still independent from the USA and China.
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.
I was also quite surprised to see that. Considering the effort Aleph Alpha put into to their new model, it seems like the Qwen team needs access to vast amounts of german data o.0
I'm really glad for these efforts for open models from within Europe.
> The second was to rephrase German documents we already had. An LLM rewrites an organic German document in the style of an encyclopedia entry, a Q&A dialogue or a text passage, preserving its content.
"an LLM" -- does that mean they are effectively learning from that LLM the German encyclopedic style? makes me wonder which LLM and how that is really sovereign.
the sovereignty topic needs more attention in general so great to see. self-hosting the model is one piece of sovereignty, but how do we handle the rest of the agent stack - embeddings, retrieval, memory, etc. Has anyone put together a practical agent stack that's 100% sovereign, where they control it all?
My suspicion is that you simply can't build an even slightly competitive model without liberally stealing your training data, in 2026, as much as I'd like it to be otherwise. You can get to the point that I suspect most of the frontier labs are at, where you've laundered the initially stolen data through the creation of huge amounts of derivative synthetic data, but still. Anyone who isn't comfortable stealing their training data is bringing a knife to a gun fight, and is going to die a noble but inevitable death.
This doesn't seem to be true. There's a clear legal path via the first-sale doctrine to train models on copyrighted works. It's been years now, and publishers still don't seem to be offering anything for training (e.g. bulk licenses solely for training use), but adversarial interoperability via cutting up books and scanning them remains perfectly legal.
There's also the ability to distill other models, which is also not illegal (though I'm sure they like to come after whomever for TOS violations, but thats a civil matter).
And, of course, the obligatory copying-isn't-theft observation. A recent supreme court judgment put it well.
> Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright, nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
Folks are pretty smart here, I think we can handle these nuances, even if we don't agree about whether they are good.
Edit: reading through the full text of their post, it looks like they are using common crawl, which is likely just as much of a copyright infringement as Anna's Archive -- it's not like published works have a unique claim to copyright. I think this strengthens your point, though: I was expecting to see scans as training data, but it doesn't appear to be the case.
hasn't IP law passed the statute of limitations? As in most models are probably trained on output of other models, as creating enough data otherwise is not feasible. Additionally, they are trained on github repos made since the AI boom, which were generated by models with IP issues (who knows what and how).
Thus training on 'clean' data is like trying to unscramble an egg.
This model isn't terrible, at least on the benchmarks. It's 78B A3B and performs about like Qwen3.6 35B A3B. You can probably run it comfortably in 96B of RAM with a decent quant that doesn't lose too much.
Unfortunately, Qwen3.6 35B A3B isn't really a useful coding model. You'd probably want Qwen3.8 27B at a minimum, which requires at least 32GB of VRAM (not system RAM) to run semi-comfortably.
So this isn't going to be a competitive model for hobbyists, and you'd have to be a bit desperate to use it for coding. But if you work in a regulated industry and don't mind paying for a bit of extra hardware, it isn't catastrophically bad, either. Probably would work fine for information extraction or as a "classifier" like Jev. (Almost any GGUF model can be turned into a classifier using llama-server. See pi.dev codemode for sample code.)
So they're not a real contender yet, but they look like they're probably at least minimally credible.
Have you tried the model itself and seen if it's "even slightly competitive" or not, and have specific complaints about it? Otherwise it feels like you're complaining about something that is easy to test but rather than taking the time to actually figuring that out first, you're arguing about some general and theoretical thing which the submission (may) directly disprove.
No, I haven’t, but I’ll donate $20 to the non-political charity of your choice if it doesn’t turn out to sit a significant difference from the frontier.
I think it’s a safe assumption that they’re leaning into “sovereign” because performance is bad.
I think you have it backwards. Sovereign is the goal, good can come later.
There is a proliferation of sovereign models under development specifically to address data sovereignty, and a loss of performance is absolutely acceptable over the risk that a once ally will turn adversarial, or a foreign business stops serving what has become critical infrastructure.
Is it noble? The entire notion that training data can be "stolen" at all is quite silly. If I "steal" content that someone created to use for training, what am I actually stealing? They didn't lose anything. They still have everything they had before. What was "stolen" was "unrealized profit", or put another way: money that wasn't theirs, that they had no entitlement to. The only actual crime that is committed is "unauthorized copying", not stealing. Support and enforcement of copyright feels wildly authoritarian. It's hard to see it as noble.
The same could be said of any digital product being sold. Nobody actually loses anything but the actual sale either when you download a cracked game or piece of software, a movie, music, etc.
I wonder if we can start having LLM distros: community led distributed training runs with periodic releases, open weights, FOSS code, the whole shebang. Maybe the public training sets can reach a level where an LLM trained on them can be good enough for most things, such as web search and aggregation, coding, etc.
I wonder how far we are from this. How far are we from LLM's Debian moment?
Interesting they recommended high end software without considering quant 4 or 8 and still used A3B which should give good throughput on cheap hardware.
If they can follow Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, the could draft off the huge reduction in VRAM requirements.
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?
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.
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/
https://x.com/konarkmodi/status/2106373678589960260?s=46
This thing is worse than a Qwen3.8 27B.
"an LLM" -- does that mean they are effectively learning from that LLM the German encyclopedic style? makes me wonder which LLM and how that is really sovereign.
> intellectual-property safety
My suspicion is that you simply can't build an even slightly competitive model without liberally stealing your training data, in 2026, as much as I'd like it to be otherwise. You can get to the point that I suspect most of the frontier labs are at, where you've laundered the initially stolen data through the creation of huge amounts of derivative synthetic data, but still. Anyone who isn't comfortable stealing their training data is bringing a knife to a gun fight, and is going to die a noble but inevitable death.
There's also the ability to distill other models, which is also not illegal (though I'm sure they like to come after whomever for TOS violations, but thats a civil matter).
And, of course, the obligatory copying-isn't-theft observation. A recent supreme court judgment put it well.
> Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple “goods, wares, [or] merchandise,” interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright, nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
Folks are pretty smart here, I think we can handle these nuances, even if we don't agree about whether they are good.
Edit: reading through the full text of their post, it looks like they are using common crawl, which is likely just as much of a copyright infringement as Anna's Archive -- it's not like published works have a unique claim to copyright. I think this strengthens your point, though: I was expecting to see scans as training data, but it doesn't appear to be the case.
Thus training on 'clean' data is like trying to unscramble an egg.
Unfortunately, Qwen3.6 35B A3B isn't really a useful coding model. You'd probably want Qwen3.8 27B at a minimum, which requires at least 32GB of VRAM (not system RAM) to run semi-comfortably.
So this isn't going to be a competitive model for hobbyists, and you'd have to be a bit desperate to use it for coding. But if you work in a regulated industry and don't mind paying for a bit of extra hardware, it isn't catastrophically bad, either. Probably would work fine for information extraction or as a "classifier" like Jev. (Almost any GGUF model can be turned into a classifier using llama-server. See pi.dev codemode for sample code.)
So they're not a real contender yet, but they look like they're probably at least minimally credible.
I think it’s a safe assumption that they’re leaning into “sovereign” because performance is bad.
There is a proliferation of sovereign models under development specifically to address data sovereignty, and a loss of performance is absolutely acceptable over the risk that a once ally will turn adversarial, or a foreign business stops serving what has become critical infrastructure.
I wonder how far we are from this. How far are we from LLM's Debian moment?
If they can follow Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, the could draft off the huge reduction in VRAM requirements.