German AI consortium releases Soofi S, an open 30B model that tops benchmarks

It tops benchmarks because it uses them in its training data. https://x.com/eliebakouch/status/2077425801633427919

Great to see more competition in this space, and especially from Europe, but... it's a shame when the benchmarks don't include the current best comparable models. They shows results against Qwen 3.5 and Gemma 3, but Qwen 3.6 and Gemma 4 have been available for ~three months.

> the facility runs entirely on renewable energy, is cooled with water from the Eisbach canal, and feeds waste heat into the surrounding Tucherpark neighborhood.

That's it right there. Show the others how it's done. Can see going forward most model training being done in winter, making for a proper resource recycling ecosystem.

Some other (as in better) sources I found:

- https://huggingface.co/spaces/Soofi-Project/Pretraining-Tech...

- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.09424

How can we get these things to fight each other for sport? Real battle bots

I think this news is more about the infrastructure than the model.

Either way, happy to see two open models from outside the us-cn duopoly in the same week.

"Fully open source model" with "Long-term, license-free availability for industry"

Nice trick to be not comparable with most other LLMs on the market, open weight or proprietary.

But I think, that's the right way.

Better late than never. Germans have entered the chat

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