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K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models

ifm.ai

21–30 of 143 posts

Re: K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models

#21
post #15
post #5

Fully open models really need to be a big part of the AI future. That includes all source code, open training data, how it's organized, fed to the model, processed, etc. Until that becomes a thing you're always going to be left wondering what exactly lies underneath the closed model you are using, leaving open the possibility for societal manipulation.

Why? Sure, I’d prefer it, too, but this is just another GNU/Linux vs. macOS situation: most of us would prefer the first, but actually get shit done on the latter.

Without open-source, there'd be no macOS.. So good thing, it exists.

Re: K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models

#22
post #18
post #5

Fully open models really need to be a big part of the AI future. That includes all source code, open training data, how it's organized, fed to the model, processed, etc. Until that becomes a thing you're always going to be left wondering what exactly lies underneath the closed model you are using, leaving open the possibility for societal manipulation.

The training data would need to have a permissive license for this to be possible.

Eventually we'll just construct 100% synthetic training data that can reliably reproduce pretrains and fine tunes.

The first broadly useful fully open source models will do this.

We already have open data / open code / open weights for some domain-specific cases, such as audio models trained on large open datasets, eg. Tacotron / LJSpeech from waaay back in the day, though that is certainly not SOTA anymore.

Distillation could possibly be considered an early case of this as raw AI outputs are themselves not copyrightable unless humans enrich, filter, or transform them. Granted, that does not handle the cases where the outputs are sufficiently similar to copyrighted original works.

Re: K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models

#23
It is great to see another player introduce a fully open stack. Nvidia's Nemotron is the only other prominent one I know of.

All that said, the headline claims do not match the self-reported performance. For example, the dense 32B model is significantly behind Qwen3.8 27B (chart towards the bottom of https://ifm.ai/blog/k2). Gemma4 31B is not in the comparison set. This is the most important sweet spot for self hosted open-weight models today and real competition here will be very welcome.

Re: K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models

#25

Not to be confused with Kimi K2. Out of all the names they could've used, they picked one that would be confusing.

I kind of assumed all the K2 names were puns. K2 is quite tall, so to get to the top of it you have to be really good at hill climbing. Anyway it’s a pretty well known mountain so I don’t think anyone can call dibs on it.

Re: K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models

#26
post #15
post #5

Fully open models really need to be a big part of the AI future. That includes all source code, open training data, how it's organized, fed to the model, processed, etc. Until that becomes a thing you're always going to be left wondering what exactly lies underneath the closed model you are using, leaving open the possibility for societal manipulation.

Why? Sure, I’d prefer it, too, but this is just another GNU/Linux vs. macOS situation: most of us would prefer the first, but actually get shit done on the latter.

And that's why companies shouldn't fear opening up, but having both is still a net benefit.

Re: K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models

#27
post #23

It is great to see another player introduce a fully open stack. Nvidia's Nemotron is the only other prominent one I know of. All that said, the headline claims do not match the self-reported performance. For example, the dense 32B model is significantly behind Qwen3.8 27B (chart towards the bottom of https://ifm.ai/blog/k2 ). Gemma4 31B is not in the comparison set. This is the most important sweet spot for self host…

They have the 32B listed as "stage 1" with the note "final checkpoint to be released." So, not finished yet. Not sure why you'd release it if it's not finished, but that's the explanation.

The 7B does look very, very good however.

Re: K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models

#28

A bit off topic, but I think I'm starting to get model fatigue. These come out 10x faster than new Javascript frameworks were coming out 10 years ago (at least new models are far easier to adopt).

Just wait until RSI gains enough traction. We'll be compute-limited rather than labor-limited.

[deleted]

Re: K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models

#30
post #27
post #23

It is great to see another player introduce a fully open stack. Nvidia's Nemotron is the only other prominent one I know of. All that said, the headline claims do not match the self-reported performance. For example, the dense 32B model is significantly behind Qwen3.8 27B (chart towards the bottom of https://ifm.ai/blog/k2 ). Gemma4 31B is not in the comparison set. This is the most important sweet spot for self host…

They have the 32B listed as "stage 1" with the note "final checkpoint to be released." So, not finished yet. Not sure why you'd release it if it's not finished, but that's the explanation. The 7B does look very, very good however.

32B performs worse than the 7B model so I'm sure they will improve it
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