Aleph Alpha Kolibri: How the sovereign German LLM works

409 points by tejaskumar__ 11 hours ago on hackernews | 11 comments

driverdan | 8 hours ago

rpdillon | 7 hours 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").
It's here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49942706. I'm currently merging the threads.

pu_pe | 7 hours ago

A blog post is not a Show HN topic.

embedding-shape | 7 hours ago

> the weights are on Hugging Face

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

pu_pe | 6 hours ago

The author did not make this model though, they used Claude to write a blog post about it.

rolymath | 6 hours ago

This is not a Show HN

wingman-jr | 6 hours 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 | 4 hours 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

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

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)