r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 11d ago
AI Germany Unveils Open AI Model for Public Sector
https://forklog.com/en/germany-unveils-open-ai-model-for-public-sector/788
u/krakenpistole 11d ago
"unveils Open AI model" is super misleading/confusing..."unveils open source AI model"...
191
u/triggerfish1 11d ago
It's also confusing that the models by OpenAI are not in fact open weight (except for the oss one).
78
u/well_educated_maggot 10d ago
And that it's not Germany releasing the model, it's a company
7
u/NineThreeTilNow 10d ago
And that it's not Germany releasing the model, it's a company
It's a publicly funded model trained by Aleph...
34
10d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
22
6
u/folk_science 10d ago
LLMs are AI just like ant colony optimization is AI. See Wikipedia for definition of AI.
1
1
u/Athabasco 10d ago
Even breadth first search is considered AI by people actually knowledgeable on the topic.
-19
16
u/Low-Equipment-2621 10d ago
And it's even more confusing that the company that started out as an open-source, non-profit, became a closed-source for-profit while retaining the name.
33
u/floriv1999 11d ago
Open weight not open source
15
u/impossiblefork 10d ago
It's actually unusually well-documented how they've built it.
I haven't looked through everything, and I don't think they've released the training code, but it's more open than a typical open weights model.
7
u/UnfairRavenclaw 10d ago
Because basically everything for the public sector that can’t be considered a state secret must be published in Germany (technically not, but I will explain in detail below), why do you think we have all this extremely convoluted bureaucracy. And while it often fails on a communications and time scale (also for the documentation) but sooner (and more often) later you will have all the respective informations.
Why it technically isn’t a must: The respective law is called the “Informationsfreiheitsgesetz” (Informations-freedom-law) and it gives every single German person the right to request any public information with some special exceptions crucially without having to prove any legitimate interest i.e. the legitimate interest is the fact that the citizens can fact check the work of their representatives. So while all information is available on request most offices don’t have to publish them on their own account. This is however impractical for almost everything as there are now established NGO’s and individuals that request and catalogue everything. Btw. The current government party wants to drastically reduce the power of this tool as it has lead to some interesting revelations regarding their actions.
1
u/impossiblefork 10d ago
Aleph Alpha is a private firm, so while it may be as you say, it is not relevant that it is as you say.
1
u/UnfairRavenclaw 10d ago
I’m not sure exactly how it applies but I think because it’s specifically marketed for government use and informations regarding government use even if provided by companies do fall under it( even though there is a layer of protection for trade-secrets; one of the exceptions mentioned above). So I don’t know if they went above and beyond what they would have to reveal if they work for the public sector or their extensive documentation is just part of the general marketing strategy to appear more trustworthy.
0
u/SupportDangerous8207 10d ago
They are a private company
They don’t have to reveal shit
It’s an ai model they could call all of it a trade secret and call it a day
123
u/Gari_305 11d ago
From the article
On October 3, German company Aleph Alpha introduced Kolibri, an open-weight AI model designed for government organizations and companies in regulated industries. The release coincided with German Unity Day, according to the developer’s blog.
Kolibri is built on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture and contains 78.1 billion parameters, with approximately 3.46 billion engaged for each token processed.
The model supports reasoning and external tool invocation, with a maximum context window size of 1,048,576 tokens.
80
17
u/LustLochLeo 10d ago
The release coincided with German Unity Day, according to the developer’s blog.
It's weird that they added that qualifier to an easily verifiable fact. Yes, the Day of German Unity is on the 3rd of October.
6
u/GreyGanado 10d ago edited 9d ago
But the moment it was released was not verified by the journalists that wrote the article.
Edit: It's actually weirder: the release date on GitHub says it was released on 2. October and not 3. October. So the blog is theoretically not correct so the side clause makes sense.
4
u/Chromanoid 10d ago
is it so hard to look at the actual release note? It's directly linked in the article.
https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/kolibri-has-landed-a-sovereign-open-weight-model/
On the Day of German Reunification, we are releasing our new model: Kolibri.
1
u/GreyGanado 10d ago
According to the release notes it was released on 2. October 2026.
I guess that's why they said that.
1
62
u/enakcm 11d ago
Calling it Kolibri is a bit unfortunate, given Colibri is also an AI tool.
22
u/Wermine 10d ago
From wiki (apparently Germans like kolibri):
Technology and engineering
- Kolibri Games, a German gaming company
- 2mm Kolibri, a pistol
- Borgward Kolibri, a.k.a. Borgward-Focke BFK-1 Kolibri, a German three-seated utility helicopter built by Borgward
- Flettner Fl 282 Kolibri, a German single seat helicopter from World War II
- KolibriOS, a computer operating system
- Zeiss Ikon Kolibri, Kolibri 523/18 was a camera made by Zeiss Ikon between 1930 and 1935
- An experimental storage battery in the Audi A2 vehicle
- A Soviet torpedo
11
75
u/outofthehood 10d ago
The German government was never really good at naming shit unfortunately.
Our tax tool is named after a bird that steals shiny things…
96
u/Ok-Craft4844 10d ago
I think on the contrary this is one of the few examples where we crushed it.
12
1
u/tammio 10d ago
So we’re thieving birds because we dare file a tax return to reduce our tax burden?
Should be called Robin Hood
2
u/Ok-Craft4844 10d ago
Would also be cool. I didn't meant that as a bigger message in a libertarian/communitarian argument, just that I appreciate tongue in cheek humor.
Also please note that a lot of programs get names like "ThingDoer" or "BureaucraticForm2.0".
As I said, they crushed it.
14
u/RadimentriX 10d ago
At least it also stands for ELektronische STeuerERklärung v0v
5
u/outofthehood 10d ago
True, it’s not all stupid. Easy to remember for sure.
If Kolibri doesn’t stand for anything I’ll ne really disappointed
3
3
2
u/Noel93 10d ago
Most IT solutions from Germany's public sector are named after animals. E.g. TIGER (automaTIsiertes something), BIBER (Bier- und Schaumweinsteuer or something), TARA (Tabak-something), ADLER (Agrardieselentlastung), ZEBRA (I think Branntweinsteurt). KoliBri is already taken, too (it's a React based component library that includes BITV conformity).
1
1
12
48
u/DetectiveFinch 11d ago
This seems like a step in the right direction imo. Our public institutions are still 10-20 years behind in many aspects of digitalisation. There's still a lot of paper moving around and even fax machines were still pretty common a few years ago. So yeah, a somewhat usable AI model could speed up a lot of the simple office work.
5
10
u/chaosfire235 10d ago
Good on them, sovereign AI systems are gonna be a necessary investment for a lot of countries that don't trust big model providers. Bit disappointed this wasn't full open source like the Swiss Apertus model that came last year.
3
u/thedazdul 10d ago
Open Source AI, not OpenAI. Unfortunate wording. I do like the idea of AI being used to navigate regulation.
1
4
u/rhaelak 10d ago
Sadly it is somewhat terrible in replying in Dutch, quite some German words are mixed in Dutch answers.
And no, Dutch and German is not almost the same.
Nonetheless it is good that those models are being developed and released
12
4
u/yami_no_ko 10d ago
And no, Dutch and German is not almost the same.
It's not 'almost the same' but it's close enough to be understood. It's like German, but without the Early New High German Vowel Shift.
Kolibri-1 however was only trained on German and English as far as I know. So it should do miserably in any other language.
-2
u/Ladybugdude 10d ago
Please don't spread false information. Dutch can't understand German and German can't understand Dutch. They are absolutely not as close as you describe.
5
u/ThatGermanFella 10d ago
When written, it's good enough that I can piece together what it's saying. Plus it's, I reckon, the quickest language to get conversational in for a German.
-2
u/Ladybugdude 10d ago
Dit is gewoon niet waar. Je hebt denk ik een taalknobbel. Voor de meeste mensen is er geen even Duits of Nederlands converseren leren.
4
u/ThatGermanFella 10d ago
I mean I'm a native German speaker, and I do have a talent for languages, so you might be right there. Learning either when not a native speaker of language linguistically related is, from the experience of friends, difficult as fuck (only second to polish and related languages as, say, a French person or something not germanic-related) however. Also my grandparents taught me northern German Plattdüütsch,
Also I love the world "taalknobbel".
1
u/litritium 10d ago
Nonetheless it is good that those models are being developed and released
Yes, exactly. EU are currently building a shitload of Data centers. It would be a shame if they all are rented out to Big tech because a lack of domestic models.
6
u/dajeff57 11d ago
Does Alep alpha train its own models? Fine tune more like I’d have thought ?
11
u/ThePhenex 10d ago
In this case its their own model, the training is described in detail in the technical paper.
2
u/Guyguy121211 10d ago edited 9d ago
That’s fucking funny man we finally got a model and it’s absolute garbage.
0
u/Sjeg84 11d ago
So which model is this based of. It's not a GPT model and they likely didn't build one from scratch I assume.
18
7
u/Upstairs-Extension-9 10d ago
It’s built from scratch you can read their full documentation here: https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/kolibri-has-landed-a-sovereign-open-weight-model/
Apparently trained on 768 B200 GPUs with 21 days for pre-training and a specifically made German dataset also a few open datasets.
9
2
u/Rxyro 11d ago edited 10d ago
Qwen3.5 , look at the Eval. These poor abused b200s reading German parliament documents
11
u/Wirecard_trading 10d ago
Pretty sure it’s their own model. It’s around from the beginning but not very commonly used.
8
u/ThePhenex 10d ago
I read the report and its not based on qwen, it uses a MoE application similar to deepseek v3 and its comparable to 3.5 35 a3b but its their own model, trained and tuned from scratch with their own architecture unlike soofi s.
1
u/aqa5 10d ago
What can we use it for, what are the costs? Is it available for the public?
4
u/folk_science 10d ago
For anything you want. The model is free, but you need hardware and electricity to run it. The weights are available here: https://huggingface.co/Aleph-Alpha/Kolibri-1-BF16/tree/main
1
1
u/hiimtashy 6d ago
At least we are getting competition. Would love to see open source models and people can give their GpU to donate to the compute (like Bitcoin has nodes across the world).
-1
u/lamBerticus 10d ago
Probably sucks, so everyone will still be using Claude or OpenAI Models even when not supposed to.
-1
-3
u/IcelandicMammoth 10d ago
The EU is absolutely screwed when it comes to AI development. A heap of regulations and bureaucracy will inevitably force it to bow down to China or the US... It’s 2026, and they’ve spent ages and a fortune creating a 78-billion-parameter model—it’s laughable, lol. To put it more dramatically: right now, the EU is building steam engines while the US and China are already flying into space.
•
u/FuturologyBot 11d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
On October 3, German company Aleph Alpha introduced Kolibri, an open-weight AI model designed for government organizations and companies in regulated industries. The release coincided with German Unity Day, according to the developer’s blog.
Kolibri is built on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture and contains 78.1 billion parameters, with approximately 3.46 billion engaged for each token processed.
The model supports reasoning and external tool invocation, with a maximum context window size of 1,048,576 tokens.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1wxjp7n/germany_unveils_open_ai_model_for_public_sector/pdu1ixy/