Kolibri brings open weights and a German-English focus

Aleph Alpha released Kolibri, a German-English language model with downloadable Apache-2.0 weights. Its mixture-of-experts design activates a small portion of its 78 billion parameters for each token. The team trained it to vary reasoning effort and to decline questions unsupported by supplied documents, targeting organizations that want control over deployment and language-specific behavior.

Aleph Alpha · Oct 3, 2026

Why it matters

Teams handling German documents have another self-hostable option to evaluate against their own tasks.

More context

Try the linked Hugging Face weights on a small document-grounding evaluation before planning deployment. Include questions whose answers are missing. Inference hardware and operating costs remain your responsibility.

Keep in mind

This is a newly released model, not a compliance guarantee. Grounding and efficiency results are vendor evaluations; 1min has not tested them. Few active parameters do not eliminate storage and memory requirements for the full model.

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