Aleph Alpha Kolibri: How the sovereign German LLM works
416 points by tejaskumar__ a day ago | 12 comments
https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/kolibri-has-landed-a-soverei...
  • driverdan a day ago |
    IMO the announcement is better https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/kolibri-has-landed-a-soverei...
    • rpdillon a day ago |
      Agree, and both are on the front page. Also, Show HN is usually for your own project, but this appears to be a blog post about someone else's project (albeit "a good friend").
    • dang a day ago |
      It's here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49942706. I'm currently merging the threads.
  • pu_pe a day ago |
    A blog post is not a Show HN topic.
    • embedding-shape a day ago |
      > the weights are on Hugging Face

      > Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with

      • pu_pe a day ago |
        The author did not make this model though, they used Claude to write a blog post about it.
  • rolymath a day ago |
    This is not a Show HN
  • wingman-jr a day ago |
    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.
  • peterBlue75 a day ago |
    The thing to note here, besides the transparency and the fact that it’s actually a good model that also works well on coding and agentic tasks, is that it’s the first release by a team formed less than a year ago, with a strong focus on iteration velocity. There’s more to come.

    disclaimer: I‘m part of the training team, happy to answer any questions

    • dang a day ago |
      Please don't copy-paste comments - it makes merging threads a pain! (and indeed the temptation to copy-paste is indication that a discussion needs merging)

      p.s. It's a great comment! no problem on that level

  • dang a day ago |
    We've merged (most of) the comments into this thread, which is currently on the frontpage:

    Kolibri: A Sovereign Open-Weight Model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49942706 - Oct 2026 (46 comments)

  • Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 9 hours ago |
    I'm always wondering why new models don't always adopt deepseek's KV tweaks. It's insanely valuable to have such powerful prefix caching and so cheap at inference time.

    Are there drawbacks to this?