Show HN: Germany's new sovereign AI model Kolibri (tej.as)

Aleph Alpha has launched Kolibri, a new open-weight large language model (LLM) designed specifically for German and English, featuring a mixture of experts architecture with 78 billion parameters. The model utilizes only 3.5 billion parameters for each token it processes, significantly enhancing efficiency. Released on October 3, 2026, under the Apache 2.0 license, Kolibri's development was meticulously aligned with the EU AI Act, ensuring compliance with European regulations and granting customers data sovereignty—enabling them to deploy the model on local servers without foreign control over their data. Kolibri excels in long-context tasks, scoring highly in evaluations for both German and English, particularly in mathematical reasoning. The significance of Kolibri lies in its strategic approach to balancing innovation and regulation in AI development. Its architecture includes advanced features such as a specialized tokenizer for better handling of German compound words and a novel reasoning protocol that helps minimize hallucinations by training the model to admit when it does not know an answer. However, it shows some weaknesses, particularly in closed-book knowledge tests and multi-turn tool calling. Overall, Kolibri sets a new benchmark for LLMs in Europe, promoting both ethical data practices and advanced AI capabilities tailored for the region's linguistic nuances.