Key Takeaways
- German research consortium releases Soofi S, an open-source AI model for German and English.
- Soofi S is designed as an alternative to US and Chinese models, with strong performance in benchmarks.
- The model uses Mixture-of-Experts architecture and focuses on European sovereignty.
A German research consortium has unveiled Soofi S, a new open-source large language model that aims to challenge the dominance of American and Chinese AI models. The project, officially named Soofi S 30B-A3B, is described as a Mixture-of-Experts hybrid Mamba-Transformer model designed for German and English tasks.
According to the technical report, Soofi S has approximately 31.6 billion parameters but activates only around 3.2 billion per generated token, making it efficient in terms of computational requirements while still offering substantial capabilities. The model was trained on about 27 trillion tokens, with a deliberate emphasis on German data during training.
Built end-to-end on Deutsche Telekom’s Industrial AI Cloud in Munich, Soofi S is part of Europe's push for sovereign AI. The consortium includes German research and industry partners such as KI Bundesverband, Fraunhofer IAIS, DFKI, TU Darmstadt, ellamind, and Merantix Momentum.
The model’s performance has been highlighted in benchmark tests where it achieved the highest English and German evaluation scores among fully open models tested. It also recorded the best code aggregate scores in both languages among 17 open base models evaluated by the Soofi team. Additionally, Soofi S outperformed European sovereign AI baselines with more active parameters.
The consortium is positioning Soofi S as a secure and open-source alternative for industrial use within European infrastructure. The model’s Hugging Face page states that it will be released under permissive open-access terms, including model weights, selected intermediate checkpoints, training details, evaluation code, hyperparameters, and data accounting where licensing allows.
Nvidia, citing Artificial Analysis data, notes that the top 10 most intelligent open-source models all use Mixture-of-Experts designs. This architecture has become common in leading open-AI models, making Soofi S a significant addition to the European AI landscape.
