Ai2’s new small AI model outperforms similarly-sized models from Google, Meta

‘Tis the week for small AI models, it seems. On Thursday, Ai2, the nonprofit AI research institute, released Olmo 2 1B, a 1-billion-parameter model that Ai2 claims beats similarly-sized models from Google, Meta, and Alibaba on several benchmarks. Parameters, sometimes referred to as weights, are the internal components of a model that guide its behavior. Olmo 2 1B is available under a permissive Apache 2.0 license on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. Unlike most models, Olmo 2 1B can be replicated from scratch; Ai2 has provided the code and data sets (Olmo-mix-1124, Dolmino-mix-1124) used to develop it. Small models might not be as capable as their behemoth counterparts, but importantly, they don’t require beefy hardware to run. That makes them much more accessible for developers and hobbyists contending with the limitations of lower-end and consumer machines. There’s been a raft of small model launches over the past few days, from Microsoft’s Phi 4 reasoning family to Qwen’s 2.5 O ... Read full article.