{"slug": "germanys-aleph-alpha-releases-kolibri-a-free-ai-model-it-says-beats-bigger-at", "title": "Germany’s Aleph Alpha releases Kolibri, a free AI model it says beats bigger rivals at maths", "summary": "Aleph Alpha released Kolibri, a free open-weight mixture-of-experts model with 78 billion total parameters and about 3.5 billion active per token, on Saturday under the Apache 2.0 licence on Hugging Face. Aleph Alpha's own unchecked benchmark table puts Kolibri ahead of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Super and Mistral Small 4 on AIME 2026 maths (96.0), GPQA Diamond science (84.3) and LiveCodeBench v6 code (85.9), while Qwen wins on tool use, long documents and a hallucination index. The release comes as Aleph Alpha is being folded into Canada's Cohere under a September 16 deal with €500 million (about $600 million) from Schwarz Group, and five days after co-CEO Reto Spörri left, leaving Ilhan Scheer as sole CEO.", "body_md": "Aleph Alpha’s logo. Image: [Aleph Alpha GmbH](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logo_Aleph_Alpha.svg) / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain, cropped\n\nAleph Alpha, Germany’s best-known AI lab, [released a new model called Kolibri](https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/kolibri-has-landed-a-sovereign-open-weight-model/) on Saturday, timed for the Day of German Unity. It is free to download, built for German as well as English, and the company says it holds its own against bigger models from Nvidia, Alibaba and Mistral.\n\nThe full weights are on [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Aleph-Alpha/Kolibri-1) under the Apache 2.0 licence, which lets businesses use and change it freely, including for commercial work.\n\n## What Kolibri is\n\nKolibri (German for hummingbird) is a mixture-of-experts model: 78 billion parameters in total, but only about 3.5 billion are used for each word it produces, which makes it cheap to run. It can read up to a million tokens at once and has four reasoning settings, from none to high.\n\nAleph Alpha says 21.3% of the text it was trained on was German, and that it used machine translation sparingly because translated text “tends to carry the cultural fingerprint of its source language”. The goal, it says, is “a model that is bilingual by design, not an English model that has read some German”.\n\nIt was trained on 20 trillion tokens, filtered down from over 200 trillion, on computers in Germany and Finland. Pre-training finished on September 11, three months after a smaller test version, Kolibri Origin, which was never released.\n\n## How it compares\n\nThe company’s own benchmark table puts Kolibri ahead of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Super and Mistral Small 4 on hard maths and science questions. These are Aleph Alpha’s figures and haven’t been checked independently.\n\n| Benchmark | Kolibri | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B | Nemotron 3 Super | Mistral Small 4 | \n|---|---|---|---|---|\n| AIME 2026 (maths) | 96.0 | 91.0 | 90.4 | 83.1 | \n| GPQA Diamond (science) | 84.3 | 83.4 | 78.0 | 74.7 | \n| LiveCodeBench v6 (code) | 85.9 | 82.5 | 82.0 | 71.2 | \n| BFCL v4 (tool use) | 61.4 | 67.2 | 61.0 | 58.0 | \n| LongBench Pro (long documents) | 64.5 | 70.8 | 62.9 | 56.4 | \n\nSource: Aleph Alpha. Higher is better.\n\nIt doesn’t win everywhere. Alibaba’s Qwen model, which uses fewer parameters in total, beats it on tool use, long documents and two customer service tests (retail and telecoms), and scores better on a hallucination index. Aleph Alpha says it trained Kolibri to say “I don’t know” when the answer isn’t in the documents it has been given, something its customers asked for.\n\n## Who it’s for\n\nThis isn’t a chatbot for the public. Aleph Alpha sells to governments and regulated industries, and says Kolibri is aimed at “public administration, industrials and aerospace”. Its pitch is control: the model is small enough to run on a customer’s own servers, so internal data never has to go to an outside AI service, and it was built “under European and German law, with no foreign control”.\n\nThat fits a wider push for [“sovereign AI” that, in most countries, still runs on American and Chinese models](https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/21/sovereign-ai-built-on-meta-llama-qwen-counterpoint/). Kolibri is one of the few built in Europe from scratch.\n\n## A busy few weeks for Aleph Alpha\n\nThe release comes as the company is being folded into Canada’s Cohere. The two [signed a deal to combine](https://aleph-alpha.com/en/news/cohere-agreement-transatlantic-sovereign-ai/) on September 16, with Schwarz Group, the owner of Lidl, committing €500 million (about $600 million) in financing. The merged company will trade as Cohere, with headquarters in Berlin and Toronto, once regulators approve it.\n\nFive days ago, co-CEO Reto Spörri [left the company](https://aleph-alpha.com/en/news/reto-spoerri-leaves-ilhan-scheer-ceo/) after fourteen months, leaving Ilhan Scheer as sole CEO.\n\n## Why it matters\n\nEuropean governments say they want AI they control, but until now most of the capable open models have come from the US and China. Kolibri gives German-speaking public bodies a home-grown option they can run themselves, though its benchmark claims still need testing by outsiders, and its future now sits with a Canadian parent.\n\n*Sources: [Aleph Alpha (Kolibri announcement and benchmarks)](https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/kolibri-has-landed-a-sovereign-open-weight-model/), [Hugging Face (Kolibri-1)](https://huggingface.co/Aleph-Alpha/Kolibri-1), [Aleph Alpha and Cohere (Sep 16)](https://aleph-alpha.com/en/news/cohere-agreement-transatlantic-sovereign-ai/), [Aleph Alpha and Cohere (Apr 24)](https://aleph-alpha.com/en/news/cohere-aleph-alpha-global-ai-powerhouse/), [Aleph Alpha (Sep 28)](https://aleph-alpha.com/en/news/reto-spoerri-leaves-ilhan-scheer-ceo/).*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/germanys-aleph-alpha-releases-kolibri-a-free-ai-model-it-says-beats-bigger-at", "canonical_source": "https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/03/aleph-alpha-kolibri-open-weight-german-sovereign-ai-model/", "published_at": "2026-10-03 13:01:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-03 13:07:14.262497+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-startups", "ai-research", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Aleph Alpha", "Kolibri", "Cohere", "Hugging Face", "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B", "Nvidia Nemotron 3 Super", "Mistral Small 4", "Schwarz Group"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/germanys-aleph-alpha-releases-kolibri-a-free-ai-model-it-says-beats-bigger-at", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/germanys-aleph-alpha-releases-kolibri-a-free-ai-model-it-says-beats-bigger-at.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/germanys-aleph-alpha-releases-kolibri-a-free-ai-model-it-says-beats-bigger-at.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/germanys-aleph-alpha-releases-kolibri-a-free-ai-model-it-says-beats-bigger-at.jsonld"}}