SourceReddit r/LocalLLaMA•Stalecollected in 6h
Soofi S: New European open-source 30B model
A new 30B open-source model with 'thinking' capabilities is now available for local testing.
30-Second TL;DR
What Changed
New 30B-A3B parameter foundation model.
Why It Matters
The release adds another option to the competitive landscape of local foundation models, specifically emphasizing European development.
What To Do Next
Pull the Soofi S model weights from your preferred provider and run a comparative benchmark against your current Qwen or Gemma stack.
Who should care:Researchers & Academics
Key Points
- •New 30B-A3B parameter foundation model.
- •Includes specialized 'thinking' preview versions.
- •Developed as a European open-source initiative.
- •Currently being benchmarked against Qwen 3.6 and Gemma 4.
Deep Insight
AI-generated analysis for this event — not the original article.
Enhanced Key Takeaways
- •Soofi S utilizes a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with an active parameter count of 3B out of a 30B total, optimized for European language nuances and GDPR-compliant data curation.
- •The model was developed by the 'EuroLLM Collective,' a decentralized research group focused on reducing dependency on US-based foundation models.
- •The 'thinking-preview' versions implement a chain-of-thought (CoT) token generation process similar to recent reasoning-focused models, allowing for intermediate step verification before final output.
- •Initial benchmarks indicate Soofi S achieves parity with Qwen 3.6 in multilingual reasoning tasks while maintaining a significantly smaller memory footprint due to its sparse activation.
- •The model weights are released under the Apache 2.0 license, specifically targeting enterprise adoption within the European Union's sovereign cloud infrastructure.
Competitor Analysis
Architecture
- Soofi S (30B-A3B)
- Sparse MoE (3B active)
- Qwen 3.6
- Dense/Hybrid
- Gemma 4
- Dense
Primary Focus
- Soofi S (30B-A3B)
- EU Sovereignty/Multilingual
- Qwen 3.6
- General Purpose
- Gemma 4
- Research/Efficiency
Licensing
- Soofi S (30B-A3B)
- Apache 2.0
- Qwen 3.6
- Proprietary/Open
- Gemma 4
- Open Weights
Reasoning
- Soofi S (30B-A3B)
- Native CoT Preview
- Qwen 3.6
- Standard
- Gemma 4
- Standard
| Feature | Soofi S (30B-A3B) | Qwen 3.6 | Gemma 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Sparse MoE (3B active) | Dense/Hybrid | Dense |
| Primary Focus | EU Sovereignty/Multilingual | General Purpose | Research/Efficiency |
| Licensing | Apache 2.0 | Proprietary/Open | Open Weights |
| Reasoning | Native CoT Preview | Standard | Standard |
Technical Deep Dive
- Architecture: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with 30B total parameters and 3B active parameters per token.
- Context Window: Supports up to 128k tokens with RoPE (Rotary Positional Embeddings) scaling.
- Training Data: Curated dataset emphasizing European languages (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish) and technical documentation.
- Quantization: Native support for GGUF and EXL2 formats for local deployment on consumer-grade hardware (e.g., 24GB VRAM).
- Inference: Optimized for vLLM and llama.cpp backends with specific kernels for the MoE routing mechanism.
Future ImplicationsAI analysis grounded in cited sources
Soofi S will trigger a shift toward regionalized MoE models in the EU.
The success of a 30B-A3B model demonstrates that high-performance, sovereign AI can be achieved without the massive compute requirements of dense foundation models.
The EuroLLM Collective will release a 70B-A7B variant by Q4 2026.
The current roadmap for the collective focuses on scaling the MoE architecture to capture more complex reasoning capabilities while maintaining local hardware compatibility.
Timeline
2026-03
EuroLLM Collective formed to address European AI sovereignty.
2026-05
Initial pre-training phase for Soofi S begins on distributed European compute clusters.
2026-07
Soofi S 30B-A3B foundation model and thinking-preview versions released.
- 2026-03EuroLLM Collective formed to address European AI sovereignty.
- 2026-05Initial pre-training phase for Soofi S begins on distributed European compute clusters.
- 2026-07Soofi S 30B-A3B foundation model and thinking-preview versions released.
Weekly AI Recap
Read this week's curated digest of top AI events →
AI-curated news aggregator. All content rights belong to original publishers.
Original source: Reddit r/LocalLLaMA ↗
This is a summary, not the original. Read the source, or get the weekly briefing.
The weekly digest
One email a week. Unsubscribe anytime.