Yet another Hacker News

Show HN: Germany's new sovereign AI model Kolibri

92 points tejaskumar__ 3 hours ago 67 comments

sajithdilshan 2 hours ago | parent

> It knows less from memory, Multi-turn tool calling is weaker, It’s not the best coding agent

Then what does it good at? Sending faxes?

skrebbel 1 hour ago | parent

Well that’s a pretty important skill for German users!

sajithdilshan 57 minutes ago | parent

Unfortunately yes.

moooo99 40 minutes ago | parent

I know this is a long standing joke, but I am 27 now, born and raised in Germany, and genuinely never had the opportunity to use a Fax machine. It honestly kind of bums me out because there is something that seems cool about Fax (being fully aware that it should be fully obsolete by now)

IshKebab 33 minutes ago | parent

Fax was never cool.

tchalla 11 minutes ago | parent

You have plenty of opportunities you’ve just not been forced to use them. Look into your contracts right now, I bet rhrrr are opportunities

stogot 1 hour ago | parent

GPT was better at chat and rag before coding

mhitza 1 hour ago | parent

I don't have the hardware to test this, but being trained to say "I don't know" instead of misleadingly talking confidently about what it does not know is interesting in itself.

m00dy 56 minutes ago | parent

I was thinking about the use cases for Germany residents actually, but yes, you're right. A German AI model needs to be able to handle fax machines (there's a bit variety of them) and also needs to handle letters coming home. german image-to-text.

pettijohn 31 minutes ago | parent

Seems like it's good at reading German documents and reasoning over them. Custom German-language tokenizer, and one of the least hallucinating models.

martianvoid 1 hour ago | parent

I just tried to play around with it on my RTX pro 6000 setup, it spends way too many tokens on overthinking stuff even if it’s able to catch the correct approach

Its speed is pretty good on the other hand with only 3B active parameters I am getting around 170 tkn/s on fp8

gizajob 1 hour ago | parent

> it spends way too many tokens on overthinking stuff

Yeah. It’s a German model.

rubyfan 1 hour ago | parent

Hey!

sajithdilshan 58 minutes ago | parent

This joke is either gonna get over analyzed by the Germans or gonna fly past straight over their heads

hypfer 50 minutes ago | parent

I'm not sure if this is truly a good faith joke tbh.

dudefeliciano 42 minutes ago | parent

petition to make this thread the official german jokes thread for this post, it's kind of annoying how everyone feels the need to make a top level comment for their oh-so-great "germans suck" joke.

tzatzikyyy 45 minutes ago | parent

Did you try lower reasoning modes as well?

cbarrick 1 hour ago | parent

I got distracted by that scroll-wheel UI component on the page. Neat!

reacharavindh 29 minutes ago | parent

The scroll wheel was cool indeed. Check their home page.. their talks on a carousel over a horizontal timeline was cool even on a phone browser.

pythonic_hell 1 hour ago | parent

The benchmarks are impressive given the problem space they are working in.

rrr_oh_man 46 minutes ago | parent

German government?

sajithdilshan 39 minutes ago | parent

More like Chancellor’s Office

9dev 1 hour ago | parent

Aleph Alpha is just a sad joke by now. The talent isn't there anymore, they never managed to catch up to the other labs, failed to deliver on several projects, and by now are just a cash grab for the investors.

gchamonlive 48 minutes ago | parent

Only if you think in terms of short term gains, but thinking in the long run, doesn't really matter if these models are crap today, all models will eventually be obsolete, unless we plateau hard on every aspect of the tech.

What matters is to have good sovereign models in 5, 10, 20 years time.

roncesvalles 41 minutes ago | parent

I'm curious why you think sovereign models matter that much if open source ones exist (unless that stops at some point). Sovereign model hosting services, yes.

hypfer 40 minutes ago | parent

The first thought that comes to mind is biases that are baked into the weights.

The next thought is culture-specific workflows, requirements etc that are best trained into weights by people that actually understand those needs.

gchamonlive 38 minutes ago | parent

We have lots of capable open weights models, but very few have actual datasets and pipelines open for reproducibility. This is a major issue that even if big companies addressed, policies could well just change, as you also acknowledge.

Society can't depend on the whims of the private sector.

HotHotLava 28 minutes ago | parent

Just open weights are not enough, I think as a nation state you'd at least want a whole sovereign training pipeline. Otherwise you are stuck when Kimi K4 stops releasing their weights.

But I don't see why this needs to be done on a state-by-state level, a sovereign EU model seems to be much more realistic in terms of funding.

stefs 22 minutes ago | parent

Open weight and -source models aren't without biases. Giving a model away for free would be a good way to distribute an agenda. With a sovereign model you can at least control the agenda and align it with your values.

HarHarVeryFunny 16 minutes ago | parent

Like it or not, AI has become part of modern warfare and well as part of the surveillance state (good for crime fighting, not for privacy), so it is an important part of national security, and you'd prefer to be as much self-sufficient for that as you can be.

Not all needs are going to be met by using or finetuning general purpose models, so ability to build your own SOTA ML models (LLMs or not) is also important.

mistrial9 11 minutes ago | parent

amazing to see blunt unfiltered commentary about making war and society level propaganda as important and necessary for a political state.

9dev 36 minutes ago | parent

For the same reason it didn't matter whether coach makers were able to build carriages that went 5% faster when the automobile was introduced, and for the same reason it won't matter if VW and Mercedes are going to improve their EV lineup in the next 5, 10, 20 years time. Their window of opportunity will be long gone and the momentum elsewhere; most probably, the market will even have evolved further by then.

KronisLV 34 minutes ago | parent

> it won't matter if VW and Mercedes are going to improve their EV lineup in the next 5, 10, 20 years time

I mean, given the fuel prices it would be very nice, alongside more charging infrastructure in the EU. :(

Not to detract from the overall point, though to be honest, it's probably worthwhile to do improvements and refinements with the current technology, even if the future holds something vastly different. Both cause of gaining expertise and also maybe an improvement or two along the way, that might carry forward.

Like I haven't seen many steam locomotives around and for me the difference between saturated steam engines and superheated ones isn't very material in regards to transportation, but the latter is used in modern turbines.

hypfer 34 minutes ago | parent

And who are you, exactly?

switchbak 9 minutes ago | parent

Well, they're "Head of Engineering @ matchory.com"

And who are you to be asking such questions?

gchamonlive 33 minutes ago | parent

When you mention a window of opportunity, what do you mean by that? A window of opportunity for what?

mmasu 30 minutes ago | parent

maybe to have a global market share, but there are plenty of players that picked up pace when they “decided” to build cars (Japan? South Korea? and many more) or electronics. Having a good sovereign model in 10/20 years might not need having the absolute best there is, and perhaps future optimizations will make building one not as prohibitively expensive as it is today. Keeping some sort of homebrew capacity now is definitely better than having none

HotHotLava 24 minutes ago | parent

Ford started mass producing cars in 1913, and yet there are plenty of car companies that started production 20+ years later and are still relevant.

HarHarVeryFunny 11 minutes ago | parent

I came here to say the same thing.

AI is here to stay - will be around for hundreds/millions of years. Whether company A is a few years ahead of company B is irrelevant. In 10 years time company A, who started the industry, may be gone completely - also irrelevant.

rjzzleep 12 minutes ago | parent

It's not that talent isn't there anymore. It's that retards are at the helm everywhere and therefore talent is running away the first chance they have.

d2kx 58 minutes ago | parent

German here. We are cheering for Mistral, which is making some good moves before the year is over, and Black Forest Labs for non-coding. But that's about it.

hypfer 45 minutes ago | parent

Speak for yourself and yourself only.

driverdan 54 minutes ago | parent

IMO the announcement is better https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/kolibri-has-landed-a-soverei...

Lucasoato 49 minutes ago | parent

> 4. It thinks in German

This means that it’s always on time, it uses acronyms for everything and when there’s a decision to be made, it sets up a committee.

hypfer 45 minutes ago | parent

Do we get the same kind of jokes with other nationalities too?

Lucasoato 33 minutes ago | parent

We can joke with every country, except one maybe.

mckirk 18 minutes ago | parent

Only the funny ones

stymaar 31 minutes ago | parent

> This means that it’s always on time

Tell that to Deutch Bahn.

sbinnee 19 minutes ago | parent

It is a good approach to promote it as a German model. But I wonder if it really thinks like the German think. I speculate they just translated texts in other languages, likely English and Chinese, into German.

hliyan 15 minutes ago | parent

Does it? I thought only semantics survive the embedding process, i.e. token conversion to vectors.

rererereferred 4 minutes ago | parent

I wonder if their very long words result in more or less token usage.

api 49 minutes ago | parent

His point about regulation and innovation is great and I wish more people thought like that.

One of humanity’s biggest problems here is we don’t know how to do moderation.

We have two modes. One is a brick taped to the accelerator and damn all consequences, driven by national pride or corporate greed or egos. The other is a brick taped to the brake driven by histrionic doomers and anti-everything pessimists.

The extremes are loud and fit in a tweet. Nuance is quiet and contemplative and usually requires an essay or a book. It’s also dynamic. Nuanced positions evolve over time as new things are learned. Extremes tend to be fixed and rigid. All this, I think, gives them higher memetic fitness in the discourse.

I don’t think this is new. Look at nuclear power, a largely pre-Internet example. You had pro nukes who minimized and hand waved away any risk and anti nukes that wanted it utterly outlawed. Nobody said “hey this is a great zero carbon source of energy but we really need to think it through carefully and manage it well.” Or if they did they were drowned out by the loud screaming extremes.

woadwarrior01 47 minutes ago | parent

> A bigger dense model beats it. Qwen3.8 27B ...

How is a 27B dense model bigger than a 78B MoE?

SyneRyder 36 minutes ago | parent

The 27B has all 27B as active parameters, while Kolibri is only 3.46B active parameters. I think that's what they meant anyway.

x1watt 45 minutes ago | parent

Was expecting that a "sovereign" AI model would at least use their own sovereign language (German) on the website as one of the options. Anyways, all the best and happy reunification day.

flohofwoe 35 minutes ago | parent

This is a blog post by some "random" dude right? The company webpage appears to be German (at least when accessed from Germany: https://aleph-alpha.com/)

orifito 24 minutes ago | parent

At least Germany is moving smarter than UK government...

testfrequency 21 minutes ago | parent

TIL

veryfancy 22 minutes ago | parent

Nice to see public goods in this space.

hypfer 17 minutes ago | parent

The ignorant, hostile, negative, and, frankly, kinda racist comments here really are just a sad showing for the currently online crowd.

But anyway. I think the main oversight when dismissing this is that not every use-case is coding a SV-style startup app. That market is quite saturated, so it would make sense to create something locally for the use-cases currently underserved by LLMs.

We will probably learn more about what this can really do once quants become available that can be run by people without an SV salary (and the biases that come with that).

spijdar 17 minutes ago | parent

The absence of any comparison to Qwen3.8 Flash, another MoE model with a small-ish (6B) number of active parameters, is pretty striking. Instead, it's compared with Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B, a model released almost a full year ago.

I get that doesn't invalidate the real "point" of the model, but...

niemandhier 10 minutes ago | parent

I think at the moment the main thing a sovereign AI model needs to be good at is auditing the results of other models.

Right now one could run an open model for most government applications and it would be good enough, you just cannot trust any of these.

So having a sovereign controlled model audit the first one would basically act like a “trust adapter”.

If the second model is cheap and fast enough, there is a business model.

You don’t even need to audit all the intermediate steps, just tool calls and end results.

holaysuns 7 minutes ago | parent

The issue with 'sovereign' is not about sneaky things a foreign entity might put in there, it's about control of the stack.

Since no individual buyer cares that much about geostrategic issues, it's almost impossible to get some random European company to think about buying anything other than 'whatever US or China' are making.

There has to be very concerted push to make a difference.

Legal mandates around sovereignty (be very careful here) could make a difference.

But there will also be market reaction: US/China companies will bend on some level and provide things like 100% EU hosted and even comply with some data source stuff.

The only real path is to be more competitive as a continent.

CorezIoOfficial 9 minutes ago | parent

Im surprised by how well this works. What is the difference from this and union alpha (other than the fact that it is open weights)?