Solar Mini Reviews in 2026

Audience

Developers and AI teams in need of a solution with robust instruction following and RAG‑enabled document processing for real‑time applications

About Solar Mini

Solar Mini is a pre‑trained large language model that delivers GPT‑3.5‑comparable responses with 2.5× faster inference while staying under 30 billion parameters. It achieved first place on the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard in December 2023 by combining a 32‑layer Llama 2 architecture, initialized with high‑quality Mistral 7B weights, with an innovative “depth up‑scaling” (DUS) approach that deepens the model efficiently without adding complex modules. After DUS, continued pretraining restores and enhances performance, and instruction tuning in a QA format, especially for Korean, refines its ability to follow user prompts, while alignment tuning ensures its outputs meet human or advanced AI preferences. Solar Mini outperforms competitors such as Llama 2, Mistral 7B, Ko‑Alpaca, and KULLM across a variety of benchmarks, proving that compact size need not sacrifice capability.

Other Popular Alternatives & Related Software

Vicuna

Vicuna-13B is an open-source chatbot trained by fine-tuning LLaMA on user-shared conversations collected from ShareGPT. Preliminary evaluation using GPT-4 as a judge shows Vicuna-13B achieves more than 90%* quality of OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Bard while outperforming other models like LLaMA and Stanford Alpaca in more than 90%* of cases. The cost of training Vicuna-13B is around $300. The code and weights, along with an online demo, are publicly available for non-commercial use.

Learn more

TinyLlama

The TinyLlama project aims to pretrain a 1.1B Llama model on 3 trillion tokens. With some proper optimization, we can achieve this within a span of "just" 90 days using 16 A100-40G GPUs. We adopted exactly the same architecture and tokenizer as Llama 2. This means TinyLlama can be plugged and played in many open-source projects built upon Llama. Besides, TinyLlama is compact with only 1.1B parameters. This compactness allows it to cater to a multitude of applications demanding a restricted computation and memory footprint.

Learn more

Mistral NeMo

Mistral NeMo, our new best small model. A state-of-the-art 12B model with 128k context length, and released under the Apache 2.0 license. Mistral NeMo is a 12B model built in collaboration with NVIDIA. Mistral NeMo offers a large context window of up to 128k tokens. Its reasoning, world knowledge, and coding accuracy are state-of-the-art in its size category. As it relies on standard architecture, Mistral NeMo is easy to use and a drop-in replacement in any system using Mistral 7B. We have released pre-trained base and instruction-tuned checkpoints under the Apache 2.0 license to promote adoption for researchers and enterprises. Mistral NeMo was trained with quantization awareness, enabling FP8 inference without any performance loss. The model is designed for global, multilingual applications. It is trained on function calling and has a large context window. Compared to Mistral 7B, it is much better at following precise instructions, reasoning, and handling multi-turn conversations.

Learn more

Llama 2

The next generation of our open source large language model. This release includes model weights and starting code for pretrained and fine-tuned Llama language models — ranging from 7B to 70B parameters. Llama 2 pretrained models are trained on 2 trillion tokens, and have double the context length than Llama 1. Its fine-tuned models have been trained on over 1 million human annotations. Llama 2 outperforms other open source language models on many external benchmarks, including reasoning, coding, proficiency, and knowledge tests. Llama 2 was pretrained on publicly available online data sources. The fine-tuned model, Llama-2-chat, leverages publicly available instruction datasets and over 1 million human annotations. We have a broad range of supporters around the world who believe in our open approach to today’s AI — companies that have given early feedback and are excited to build with Llama 2.

Learn more

Pricing

Starting Price:

$0.1 per 1M tokens

Integrations

See Integrations

Ratings/Reviews

Overall 0.0 / 5

ease 0.0 / 5

features 0.0 / 5

design 0.0 / 5

support 0.0 / 5

This software hasn't been reviewed yet. Be the first to provide a review:

Review this Software

Videos and Screen Captures

Other Useful Business Software

Save Up to 91% on Cloud Compute With Spot VMs

Automatic sustained-use discounts. One free VM per month. No negotiation needed.

Run batch jobs at 60-91% off with Spot VMs. Long-running workloads get automatic discounts with sustained use.

Try Free

Product Details

Platforms Supported

Cloud

Training

Documentation

Live Online

Webinars

In Person

Videos

Support

Phone Support

Online

Compare This Software

Llama 2

The next generation of our open source large language model. This release includes model weights and starting code for pretrained and fine-tuned Llama language models — ranging from 7B to 70B parameters. Llama 2 pretrained models are trained on 2 trillion tokens, and have double the context...

Compare
Mistral 7B

Mistral 7B is a 7.3-billion-parameter language model that outperforms larger models like Llama 2 13B across various benchmarks. It employs Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) for faster inference and Sliding Window Attention (SWA) to efficiently handle longer sequences. Released under the Apache 2.0...

Compare
Vicuna

Vicuna-13B is an open-source chatbot trained by fine-tuning LLaMA on user-shared conversations collected from ShareGPT. Preliminary evaluation using GPT-4 as a judge shows Vicuna-13B achieves more than 90%* quality of OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Bard while outperforming other models like LLaMA and...

Compare
Mistral NeMo

Mistral NeMo, our new best small model. A state-of-the-art 12B model with 128k context length, and released under the Apache 2.0 license. Mistral NeMo is a 12B model built in collaboration with NVIDIA. Mistral NeMo offers a large context window of up to 128k tokens. Its reasoning, world...

Compare
TinyLlama

The TinyLlama project aims to pretrain a 1.1B Llama model on 3 trillion tokens. With some proper optimization, we can achieve this within a span of "just" 90 days using 16 A100-40G GPUs. We adopted exactly the same architecture and tokenizer as Llama 2. This means TinyLlama can be plugged and...

Compare

Recommended Software

Llama 2

The next generation of our open source large language model. This release includes model weights and starting code for pretrained and fine-tuned Llama language models — ranging from 7B to 70B parameters. Llama 2 pretrained models are trained on 2 trillion tokens, and have double the context...

See Software
Mistral 7B

Mistral 7B is a 7.3-billion-parameter language model that outperforms larger models like Llama 2 13B across various benchmarks. It employs Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) for faster inference and Sliding Window Attention (SWA) to efficiently handle longer sequences. Released under the Apache 2.0...

See Software
Vicuna

Vicuna-13B is an open-source chatbot trained by fine-tuning LLaMA on user-shared conversations collected from ShareGPT. Preliminary evaluation using GPT-4 as a judge shows Vicuna-13B achieves more than 90%* quality of OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Bard while outperforming other models like LLaMA and...

See Software