Korean LLM Solar tops ranking of best open source models

Upstage's home grown large language model Solar topped the list of Hugging Face's open LLM Leaderboard with a score of 74.2. [HUGGING FACE]

Solar, a home grown large language model (LLM), has been recognized as the top open source large-scale AI model by global AI platform Hugging Face, beating well-known competitors such as OpenAI and Mistral AI.

Korean startup Upstage released Solar on Hugging Face on Thursday and it shot up the ranks to land No. 1 on the platform’s open LLM Leaderboard with a score of 74.2.

Hugging Face acts as a hub for AI experts and enthusiasts and the LLM leaderboard is considered a barometer of open source generated AI models. It grades the models based on standards such as the model’s reasoning, common sense interference, hallucination prevention, contextual understanding and factual accuracy.

It is the first time an in-house LLM developed by a Korean company has topped the list. Upstage previously topped the list for tuning Meta’s open source AI “LLaMA2,” but this is the first time it was recognized for its own AI technology.

Following Solar was China-based Alibaba’s latest model Qwen, and then Mistral AI’s Mixtral 8x7B, a Paris-based unicorn company with a corporate value of $2 billion.

Solar’s parameter scale is at 10.7 billion, less than one-sixth the size of Qwen’s 72 billion parameter model.

Upstage plans to enter the global generative AI market by collaborating with tech players such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Poe and Together.ai.

“We are happy to unveil a model that surpasses the world’s AI companies and we hope that Upstage’s Solar will become a model for everyone,” said Upstage’s CEO Kim Seong-hoon in a statement.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]