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German AI consortium releases Soofi S, an open 30B model that tops benchmarks

the-decoder.com

July 16, 2026

7 min read

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54/100

Summary

The German research consortium has released Soofi S, an open-source language model with 30 billion parameters, trained on Deutsche Telekom's AI cloud infrastructure. The model features a hybrid architecture that activates only 3.2 of its 31.6 billion parameters per token, maintaining processing speed with long inputs and excelling in both English and German benchmarks.

Key Takeaways

The German AI consortium released Soofi S, an open-source language model with 30 billion parameters, trained entirely on Deutsche Telekom's AI cloud infrastructure.
Soofi S utilizes a hybrid architecture that activates only 3.2 billion parameters per token, maintaining processing speed for long inputs.
The model outperforms other fully open models in benchmarks for English and German, surpassing leaders like OLMo 3 32B and Apertus 70B.
Soofi S was trained on approximately 27 trillion tokens, with a training mix heavily weighted towards German data.

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Community Sentiment

Mixed

Positives

Great to see more competition in this space, and especially from Europe, but it’s disappointing the benchmarks don’t include the current best comparable models.
It's refreshing to see model training powered entirely by renewable energy — a step towards a sustainable AI future!

Concerns

It tops benchmarks because it uses them in its training data — that's a major red flag for credibility.
Disappointing. Sounds like Volkswagen 2.0 — concerns about ethical practices are looming large.
The benchmarks are outdated, showing results against models that have been surpassed — feels like a missed opportunity.