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Arcee.ai, a startup focused on developing small AI models for commercial and enterprise use, is opening up its own AFM-4.5B model for limited free usage by small companies — posting the weights on Hugging Face and allowing enterprises that make less than $1.75 million in annual revenue to use it without charge under a custom “Arcee Model License.“
Designed for real-world enterprise use, the 4.5-billion-parameter model — much smaller than the tens of billions to trillions of leading frontier models — combines cost efficiency, regulatory compliance, and strong performance in a compact footprint.
AFM-4.5B was one of a two part release made by Arcee last month, and is already “instruction tuned,” or an “instruct” model, which is designed for chat, retrieval, and creative writing and can be deployed immediately for these use cases in enterprises. Another base model was also released at the time that was not instruction tuned, only pre-trained, allowing more customizability by customers. However, both were only available through commercial licensing terms — until now.
Arcee’s chief technology officer (CTO) Lucas Atkins also noted in a post on X that more “dedicated models for reasoning and tool use are on the way,” as well.
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“Building AFM-4.5B has been a huge team effort, and we’re deeply grateful to everyone who supported us We can’t wait to see what you build with it,” he wrote in another post. “We’re just getting started. If you have feedback or ideas, please don’t hesitate to reach out at any time.”
The model is available now for deployment across a variety of environments —from cloud to smartphones to edge hardware.
It’s also geared toward Arcee’s growing list of enterprise customers and their needs and wants — specifically, a model trained without violating intellectual property.
As Arcee wrote in its initial AFM-4.5B announcement post last month: “Tremendous effort was put towards excluding copyrighted books and material with unclear licensing.”
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