Model reference · open weights

Athene

LLMs Nexusflow Text gen 2 builds Its own licence terms 3k dl/mo

Athene is an open-weight language model from Nexusflow. Athene-V2-Chat (BF16) weighs 145 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is 4× L40S 48 GB.

  • Athene-V2-Chat is a 72.7B parameter text-generation model developed by Nexusflow and finetuned from Qwen 2.5 72B-Instruct.
  • It supports a context length of 32,768 tokens and operates in English.
  • The model is released under the Nexusflow Research License.

Summary of the Nexusflow/Athene-V2-Chat model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byNexusflow
Released2024-11-12
Parameters72.7B
VRAM145 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for Athene-V2-Chat (BF16)

145 GBweights, file size
328 MBcache per 1K tokens
962 MBruntime overhead, at least
32,768 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each32K each
RTX 3060 12 GB … H200 141 GB
11 smaller cards
———
B200 180 GB82all 32K176 GB
4× L40S 48 GB
tensor parallel
92all 32K44.0 GB a card
2× RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB
tensor parallel
112all 32K93.8 GB a card
2× H200 141 GB
tensor parallel
4411all 32K138 GB a card
4× H100 80 GB
tensor parallel
5313all 32K78.1 GB a card
4× A100 80 GB
tensor parallel
6015all 32K78.2 GB a card
2× B200 180 GB
tensor parallel
7117all 32K176 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each32K tokens each
1149 GB157 GB
5160 GB200 GB
8168 GB232 GB
16189 GB318 GB
32232 GB490 GB
64318 GB834 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
Athene-V2-Chat (above) ↗ 72.7BBF16 145 GB4× L40S 48 GB
Athene-70B ↗ 70.6BBF16 141 GB4× L40S 48 GB

From the model card

What Nexusflow says about Athene

Read the model card

We introduce Athene-V2-Chat-72B, an open-weights LLM on-par with GPT-4o across benchmarks. It is currently the best open model according to Chatbot Arena, where it beats GPT-4o-0513 (the best GPT-4o model on Arena) in hard and math category, and is on-par with GPT-4o-0513 in coding, instruction following, longer query and multi-turn.

It is trained through RLHF with Qwen-2.5-72B-Instruct as base model. Athene-V2-Chat-72B excels in chat, math, and coding. Its sister model, Athene-V2-Agent-72B, surpasses GPT-4o in complex function calling and agentic applications.

Usage

Athene-V2-Chat uses the same chat template as Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct. Below is an example simple usage using the Transformers library.

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_name = "Nexusflow/Athene-V2-Chat"

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_name,
    torch_dtype="auto",
    device_map="auto"
)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)

prompt = "Write a Python function to return the nth Fibonacci number in log n runtime."

messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": prompt}
]

text = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    tokenize=False,
    add_generation_prompt=True
)

model_inputs = tokenizer([text], return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)

generated_ids = model.generate(
    **model_inputs,
    max_new_tokens=2048
)

generated_ids = [
    output_ids[len(input_ids):] for input_ids, output_ids in zip(model_inputs.input_ids, generated_ids)
]

response = tokenizer.batch_decode(generated_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)[0]

Note that by adding a system prompt that encourages the model to think step by step, the model can improve further on difficult math queries and problems like counting rs in strawberry. For fairness consideration we do not include such system prompt during chat evaluation.

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank the LMSYS Organization for their support of testing the model. We would like to thank Qwen Team and the open source community for their efforts in providing the datasets and base models.

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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