U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

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mmoelf about 4 hours ago 41 commentsRead Article on genesisopenmodels.anl.gov

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Discussion (41 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

firasd•about 2 hours ago

Just realized that there are basically no American open models right now ever since the Llama series was abandoned. Basically Gemma and GPT-OSS I guess?

Ah but Mira Murati's new Inkling is Apache 2.0

But it makes sense that if you're a university researcher you are thinking about what's a model that will be open weight and developed over the long term and doesn't raise 'Chyna' concerns in Washington DC

ipsum2•about 2 hours ago

There's a bunch of American open models. Inkling, Nemotron, Trinity come to mind, but I'm sure there's others.

embedding-shape•about 1 hour ago

Laguna S 2.1 is really great too, in the "preview" release they've done so far at least. Still pending some reasoning-looping, but besides that, it's a really strong model to run within 96GB VRAM with the NVFP4 variants, and it's really good at coding (specifically).

walrus01•36 minutes ago

There was an obvious problem in the original release, they re issued it after like a week with the reasoning looping supposedly fixed.

behnamoh•about 1 hour ago

No it doesn't follow instructions and is substantially slower than ds4.

kadoban•about 1 hour ago

Yeah I think it got bad press because the chat templates (or something?) were messed up on first release, but I've been using a quant of it and it's a powerhouse, better than qwen 3.6 27b for local on a 3090, which is saying a lot.

firasd•about 2 hours ago

Just looked into some Nemotron stats

Looks like on <https://arena.ai> agent arena (grouped by lab) Nvidia is 15/15 (much worse than Thinky and Mistral) and on text arena it's 18/27

On <https://openrouter.ai/models?order=most-popular> I definitely see usage though (probably mostly cause Nemotron 3 Ultra is free) the grouped order is DeepSeek, Tencent, Xiaomi, OpenAI, Z.ai, Nvidia

coder543•about 1 hour ago

I think glancing at a random snapshot from today misses all the context. Nemotron 3 is far more significant than you're giving it credit for.

At this point, Nemotron 3 is really an 8 month old model series. That's when Nemotron 3 Nano was released, and the Nemotron 3 Super/Ultra models this year are obviously based on that recipe, mostly just bigger with a few tweaks here and there. Against today's models, no, not that interesting. Each of the Nemotron 3 models were briefly competitive when they launched, but never exceptional, and less competitive with each scale up. The fact that it took so long for Nemotron 3 Ultra to launch really hampered its competitiveness.

The Nemotron 3 series is extremely open about training recipes and training data, far more open than most open weight models, and that is valuable.

Before Nemotron 3, Nvidia had never released a single LLM that I would consider interesting at all, so Nemotron 3 was a big step up. The closest thing was Mistral NeMo, but a significant part of the credit there goes to the Mistral team, not Nvidia.

Given how much Nemotron 3 improved, I'm curious to see if Nemotron 4 will take them to a leading edge level instead of just briefly competitive.

(Nvidia released a Nemotron 3 and a Nemotron 4 like 3 years ago... this year's Nemotron 3 is entirely unrelated. Nvidia's naming schemes leave a little bit to be desired.)

written-beyond•about 2 hours ago

Don't forget IBM

loeg•about 2 hours ago

I would not be shocked if another open model eventually shakes out of Facebook (based on Zuckerberg's public remarks).

solomatov•about 2 hours ago

Which remarks? Could you share a link?

loeg•12 minutes ago

He said something to the effect of "I love open source and open models and we'll do open models when it makes sense and closed models when it makes sense" in a recent Q&A.

walrus01•37 minutes ago

Laguna is the most recent and capable one that comes to mind. In its size class it is not as "smart" in my experience as qwen 3.5 122 or DeepSeek v4 flash 0731 (all at q8), but it's also not terrible.

https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Laguna-S-2.1-GGUF

wmf•about 2 hours ago

Also Nemotron and Arcee.

logicallee•13 minutes ago

I've used Inkling a lot recently, it's an American open model and is really good!

mistrial9•about 1 hour ago

review of AllenAI Olmo research team and commitment to OSS -- AI2 complete transparency including training data, code, intermediate checkpoints, and detailed logs for reproducibility and scientific rigor.

connorbrinton•about 1 hour ago

Laguna S 2.1 is another fairly impressive-for-the-size American open model

an0malous•about 1 hour ago

Do all these models have any significant architectural differences or training data sources? What are the factors going into the diversity of their performance?

ux266478•about 1 hour ago

The article posted is basically entirely about that.

andsoitis•about 1 hour ago

Does Europe have an equivalent program?

shakna•23 minutes ago

As part of a much larger series of initiatives towards digital sovereignty, yes. [0]

[0] https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/strengtheni...

Smith42•about 2 hours ago

What would the selected participants get from this? Looks like there is no offer of funding?

datlife•about 1 hour ago

This is refreshing considering all the FUD (mostly from 1 frontier lab) happening around Open weight models.

Thegn•about 2 hours ago

“Gomi” is the Japanese word for garbage. Gotta wonder if someone has a sense of humor…

greggsy•about 1 hour ago

The Australian Liberal Party (basically our version of conservative republicans) proposed the National Energy Guarantee policy in 2017, which inevitably failed due to the media and public’s relative literacy and tendency to turn policy names into acronyms.

yewenjie•about 2 hours ago

I couldn't find any details about size or training data for the model.

robotbikes•about 2 hours ago

It looks like they're taking applications for training data (due August 14th), so I think it's safe to say this is just an announcement of intent and a call for involvement vs. something that is readily available. Seems almost quaint in comparison to the strategy of sucking up every piece of data you can find anywhere on the Internet and feeding it to your LLM but I suspect their intent is to be more careful in what they train their model on.

villish•43 minutes ago

I have no doubt companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google will rush to give them all the data they want in order to keep those government contracts flowing.

andsoitis•about 1 hour ago

I wonder why it took so long.

dmix•about 1 hour ago

Mostly because it's generally a bad idea for government to try to compete with a brand new tech industry with hundreds of billions in private capital developing commercial models. If the American private industry does actually wash out vs Chinese open models there might be talent available for them to put money into, so maybe they are just preparing for that scenario in the meantime.

MangoCoffee•about 1 hour ago

The American attitude is generally to let private companies build up a new industry so it can create jobs and pay taxes. However, in the LLM race, the Chinese open weight playbook pretty much killed that. China has basically commoditized LLMs. Chinese models are good enough, so the race has come down to who can offer the cheapest tokens.

thegreatpeter•about 2 hours ago

Pretty cool I’ll take it. Thanks!

riffic•about 1 hour ago

stewards of the nuclear weapons biz. they'll do great here.

shenenee•about 1 hour ago

Genesis is skynet

placedrock•about 1 hour ago

Modeling with my life as data.