Model reference · open weights
Athene is an open-weight language model from Nexusflow. Athene-70B (BF16) weighs 141 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is 4× L40S 48 GB.
Summary of the Nexusflow/Athene-V2-Chat model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.
What it is
| Released by | Nexusflow |
|---|---|
| Released | 2024-11-12 |
| Parameters | 72.7B |
| VRAM | 141 GB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Requests at once | Context max | Memory |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8K each | |||
| RTX 3060 12 GB … H200 141 GB 11 smaller cards | — | — | |
| B200 180 GB | 10 | all 8K | 176 GB |
| 4× L40S 48 GB tensor parallel | 11 | all 8K | 44.0 GB a card |
| 2× RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB tensor parallel | 13 | all 8K | 93.8 GB a card |
| 2× H200 141 GB tensor parallel | 46 | all 8K | 138 GB a card |
| 4× H100 80 GB tensor parallel | 55 | all 8K | 78.1 GB a card |
| 4× A100 80 GB tensor parallel | 62 | all 8K | 78.2 GB a card |
| Requests at once | 8K tokens each |
|---|---|
| 1 | 145 GB |
| 5 | 155 GB |
| 8 | 164 GB |
| 16 | 185 GB |
| 32 | 228 GB |
| 64 | 314 GB |
One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.
Builds
| Build | Params | Precision | Weights | Smallest setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Athene-V2-Chat ↗ | 72.7B | BF16 | 145 GB | 4× L40S 48 GB |
| Athene-70B (above) ↗ | 70.6B | BF16 | 141 GB | 4× L40S 48 GB |
From 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.
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.
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.