AI2 byteifies Qwen 3 8B and Llama 3 8B into Bwen and Blama, nearly matching originals

allen_ai · x · 2026-10-07

AI2 byteified Qwen 3 8B and Llama 3 8B to create Bwen 8B and Blama 8B, both coming close to matching their source models in evaluations; Bwen 8B also outperforms Bolmo 7B across the aggregate evaluation suite.

The Bolmo collection on Hugging Face includes Bolmo-7B/1B, Bwen-8B, Llama-3-Blama-8B and corresponding Stage 1 checkpoints.

Related event: AI2's byte-level language model Bolmo published in Nature with open weights(6 posts)→

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