Orai

The Latxa model was an important milestone for artificial intelligence in the Basque language. Until then, we had no open-weight model that handled Basque decently. Since then, several others have been created specifically fine-tuned for Basque: Kimu (Orai) and the Latxa Qwen3 VL family of models recently released by HiTZ. At the same time, new top-tier local models have been emerging — Qwen, Gemma, etc. — which can be especially interesting for use in agents with external tools. These models are also improving their Basque language capabilities noticeably. But do they match the Latxa model? ...

Orai has just released a language model called Kimu. Based on Gemma 2, they have created models with 2B and 9B parameters. They have successfully injected the knowledge required to speak and understand Basque into the base model. I have converted both Kimu models to the GGUF format and published them on Hugging Face. This makes it possible to use the Kimu model with applications like Llama.cpp or Ollama. ...