Category narrowing to this degree really has diluted the term "SOTA" quite a lot
You mean it's state of the art for this subset of benchmarks you're targeting? No? Well surely it's state of the art for models of a certain size category? Huh, what about models that are available for local inference? O, state of the art for open models of a certain size made in the US specifically. Uh. Neat!
Playing games like this also makes it very easy to accidentally say things that aren't true, like in the headline of the article...
> Introducing Ripple-65B Preview, a Frontier Open-Weight Model
It's not "frontier", it's not "frontier" even in the category of open-weight models (though usually that phrasing would mean frontier over all, and also open weight)... it's only "frontier" in the small sub-category of US made open-weight models.
AFAIK the currently biggest US open-weight model is Inkling, which they include in the comparison, so at least their claim is not limited to a size category. Still they score 0.42 percentage points higher than the second-best model on their chosen benchmark, so it's hardly a meaningful lead.
For sure, but unfortunately, there's a non-zero chance the state department at some point makes the "US" part of this mandatory for a bunch of companies.
Irrelevant. A term can be well-defined and used correctly while also being diluted. In this case, I am pointing out that it's diluted by narrowing the category in which the claim is being made. I have no doubt that in this narrowed category, the term is being used correctly. This has no bearing on the fact that by narrowing the category in that way, this claim is made remarkably less impressive or interesting to many people hearing it, including myself
There are several situations where some of us are explicitly prohibited from using models from companies not under the jurisdiction of the United States. It doesn't mean these models are competitive when looked at from a global view but it is also not an irrelevant differentiation.
It's great to see another competitive open weight model. Congratulations!
But as is, it's probably hard to become popular amongst hobbyists and local model enthusiasts like Qwen's 27B class models or MOE models because it's a 65B dense model and inference will be prohibitively slow on consumer grade hardware, and seems like the goal/mission of the company behind this model is to automate chip design.
So if I have to assume and connect the dots, this is for the companies who want to use AI in air-gapped environments for chip design so that they protect their IPs (not leaking to third party AI labs/hostile parties) and can afford lots of server grade inference hardware for a quick unlock with the big dense model.
Is it competitive overall or just competitive when compared to "U.S. Open-Weight models that are otherwise pretty decent at agentic coding"? The latter does not imply the former.
What'll be interesting is how it performs relative to Qwen3.8 27b when quantised to the same size. Which, of course, is a comparison they don't want to do.
Well, obviously. These newer American models aren’t competing with Qwen yet. They are competing for American businesses and organizations that can’t/won’t use Chinese models.
They are playing catch-up, but I’m happy to see new players to the game, and it will be interesting to watch how they develop
What's funnier is that after cherry picking models for comparison, they further cherry picked Inking for size comparison instead of better and smaller Beam 1.0
The bar chart also shows Nemotron 3 Ultra instead of smaller and better Nemotron 3.5 Super.
I think it's because the primary users of this model won't even look at "those other open weight models" as options. This is the right chart to present to those who would consider this model. (e.g. US Gov't agencies, chip design industry, etc etc)
US Gov won't let Chinese models be hosted on any internal infra, not even supposed to use them for local AI. So there is absolutely a market for US-made or non-Chinese models there.
Because Chinese models heavily rely on distillation and regularly behave strangely in public benchmarks (where they score much better than in private evaluations), even if many world class researchers are Chinese. It's difficult to quantify to what extend labs like Moonshot would be competitive if they could not distill from OpenAI, now that Anthropic mostly blocks it
Speaking as someone who has High-Memory Mac Studios, it is great that there is finally a model that will run at usable speeds with high quality. In my experience, the sweet spot for Mac Clusters is around 200GB of weights, which this is far under. Congratulations to the recursive team for building an open model that will actually run!
Category narrowing to this degree really has diluted the term "SOTA" quite a lot
You mean it's state of the art for this subset of benchmarks you're targeting? No? Well surely it's state of the art for models of a certain size category? Huh, what about models that are available for local inference? O, state of the art for open models of a certain size made in the US specifically. Uh. Neat!
Playing games like this also makes it very easy to accidentally say things that aren't true, like in the headline of the article...
> Introducing Ripple-65B Preview, a Frontier Open-Weight Model
It's not "frontier", it's not "frontier" even in the category of open-weight models (though usually that phrasing would mean frontier over all, and also open weight)... it's only "frontier" in the small sub-category of US made open-weight models.
AFAIK the currently biggest US open-weight model is Inkling, which they include in the comparison, so at least their claim is not limited to a size category. Still they score 0.42 percentage points higher than the second-best model on their chosen benchmark, so it's hardly a meaningful lead.
For sure, but unfortunately, there's a non-zero chance the state department at some point makes the "US" part of this mandatory for a bunch of companies.
The US bit got me as well.
I guess it makes sense - there is a segmentation where users may want to run on domestic "frontier LLMs."
No, the term is well defined. It means being on the Pareto curve of performance vs size, such as: https://tinyurl.com/26sw35fw
Irrelevant. A term can be well-defined and used correctly while also being diluted. In this case, I am pointing out that it's diluted by narrowing the category in which the claim is being made. I have no doubt that in this narrowed category, the term is being used correctly. This has no bearing on the fact that by narrowing the category in that way, this claim is made remarkably less impressive or interesting to many people hearing it, including myself
well yes but the y axis heavily depends on the benchmark you choose
By...whom? An ISO standard? Highly cited scientific literature?
A tinyurl pic linked by randoms over the internet?
State of the AI-Apocalypse.
There are several situations where some of us are explicitly prohibited from using models from companies not under the jurisdiction of the United States. It doesn't mean these models are competitive when looked at from a global view but it is also not an irrelevant differentiation.
It's great to see another competitive open weight model. Congratulations!
But as is, it's probably hard to become popular amongst hobbyists and local model enthusiasts like Qwen's 27B class models or MOE models because it's a 65B dense model and inference will be prohibitively slow on consumer grade hardware, and seems like the goal/mission of the company behind this model is to automate chip design.
So if I have to assume and connect the dots, this is for the companies who want to use AI in air-gapped environments for chip design so that they protect their IPs (not leaking to third party AI labs/hostile parties) and can afford lots of server grade inference hardware for a quick unlock with the big dense model.
Neat!
Is it competitive overall or just competitive when compared to "U.S. Open-Weight models that are otherwise pretty decent at agentic coding"? The latter does not imply the former.
What'll be interesting is how it performs relative to Qwen3.8 27b when quantised to the same size. Which, of course, is a comparison they don't want to do.
Well, obviously. These newer American models aren’t competing with Qwen yet. They are competing for American businesses and organizations that can’t/won’t use Chinese models.
They are playing catch-up, but I’m happy to see new players to the game, and it will be interesting to watch how they develop
Congratulations I guess but it's a pretty bad look to not even mention those other open weight models.
What's funnier is that after cherry picking models for comparison, they further cherry picked Inking for size comparison instead of better and smaller Beam 1.0
The bar chart also shows Nemotron 3 Ultra instead of smaller and better Nemotron 3.5 Super.
We've always been at war with eurasia.
Seriously though, it's just easier to pretend that China doesn't exist when they're stomping us this badly.
I think it's because the primary users of this model won't even look at "those other open weight models" as options. This is the right chart to present to those who would consider this model. (e.g. US Gov't agencies, chip design industry, etc etc)
Do those other models usually mention all the competition? I haven't noticed
Right? These are not likely to be meaningful points of comparison to anyone but the authors.
Maybe Palantir will use it or something. There probably is a market for US models but I don't know how large it will be.
US Gov won't let Chinese models be hosted on any internal infra, not even supposed to use them for local AI. So there is absolutely a market for US-made or non-Chinese models there.
Because Chinese models heavily rely on distillation and regularly behave strangely in public benchmarks (where they score much better than in private evaluations), even if many world class researchers are Chinese. It's difficult to quantify to what extend labs like Moonshot would be competitive if they could not distill from OpenAI, now that Anthropic mostly blocks it
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-astra-model-...
Speaking as someone who has High-Memory Mac Studios, it is great that there is finally a model that will run at usable speeds with high quality. In my experience, the sweet spot for Mac Clusters is around 200GB of weights, which this is far under. Congratulations to the recursive team for building an open model that will actually run!
This model scores 80.5 on Terminal Bench 2.1
For reference Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (which is bigger than this model but probably cheaper to run due to MoE) scores 84.3, and Qwen 3.8-27B scores 73.0.
I think this model could be competitive, depending on how much it was benchmaxxed compared to Qwen?
Agentic coding benchmarks look great.
I think we will find the market is going to move into omni multi-modal models: text, moe, agentic tasks, voice, images, and video all in one LLM.
These are pretty odd benchmarks to use. Terminal Bench 2.1 is old. SWE-bench was disavowed by OpenAI. DeepSWE is clearly benchmark-hacked by Gemini.
When a post doesn’t mention Qwen for comparison, you know the performance isn’t going to be great.
I mean Qwen 3.8 27B hits 73% on TB2.1 and 42.2% on DeepSWE....
So we have a Recursive and a Ricursive, both making LLMs?
Time to start Rickursive, the lab that will never give you up and never let you down.
And it should acquire the existing two
Roll them up, you might say.
we need RichUrsive
There seems to be some recursion going on here.
One making self-improving AI via AI-chip co-design, the other relying only on software for self-improving AI.
I hope they never have to call each other about anything. It could get confusing if neither knows who is the base case.
Would love a 27B model. Wonder if we'll get a distillation.
Not to be confused with https://recursive.com/
The comparison chart is befuddling.
Only benchmarking against other garbage american models?
LMFAO get out of my feed
I'm sorry but what is "U.S." implying here?
Is this sponsored by the us gov? did it only train on US data? does it only work on the US?
It's a US group that made it, in the same vein that OpenAI and Anthropic have US models.
I think it’s the same as EU sovereign ones?
It means that it's an American AI lab behind it.
...hiring Chinese people to do it.