Aleph Alpha Kolibri: How the Sovereign German LLM Works
- Kolibri is an open-weight large language model (LLM) from Aleph Alpha for German and English: a mixture of experts with 78 billion parameters that only uses about 3.5 billion of them for each token it reads or writes.
- It came out on 3 October 2026 under the Apache 2.0 license, the weights are on Hugging Face, and it was trained from scratch on infrastructure in Germany and Finland.
- (Kolibri is German for hummingbird, which is cute for a model whose whole trick is being light.) I live in Germany, and at SmashingConf New York in 2024 I told the room what I’d heard in the US when I said where I’m
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- Kolibri is an open-weight large language model (LLM) from Aleph Alpha for German and English: a mixture of experts with 78 billion parameters that only uses about 3.5 billion of them for each token it reads or writes.
- It came out on 3 October 2026 under the Apache 2.0 license, the weights are on Hugging Face, and it was trained from scratch on infrastructure in Germany and Finland.
- (Kolibri is German for hummingbird, which is cute for a model whose whole trick is being light.) I live in Germany, and at SmashingConf New York in 2024 I told the room what I’d heard in the US when I said where I’m
Sources: Tej