Model reference · open weights

h2o-danube3

Available as managed deployment LLMs h2oai Text gen 1 variants 75k dl/mo

h2o-danube3 is an open-weight language model from h2oai. AxForge deploys and operates it for you on dedicated EU-owned hardware — with the licence handled where one is required.

Available as managed deployment — configured and operated for you on dedicated EU hardware, quoted per deployment.

What it is

Released byh2oai
TypeLanguage models
TaskText gen
Parameters (lead)514M
Context8k tokens
Runs withtransformers
Released2024-07-04
Popularity75k downloads / month
LicenceOpen weights

About

What h2o-danube3 is

alt="Slightly cropped image" style="width: 102%; height: 102%; object-fit: cover; object-position: center; margin: -5% -5% -5% -5%;">

Read the full model card

Summary

h2o-danube3-500m-chat is a chat fine-tuned model by H2O.ai with 500 million parameters. We release two versions of this model:

Model NameDescription
h2oai/h2o-danube3-500m-baseBase model
h2oai/h2o-danube3-500m-chatChat model

This model was trained using H2O LLM Studio.

Can be run natively and fully offline on phones - try it yourself with H2O AI Personal GPT.

Model Architecture

We adjust the Llama 2 architecture for a total of around 500m parameters. For details, please refer to our Technical Report. We use the Mistral tokenizer with a vocabulary size of 32,000 and train our model up to a context length of 8,192.

The details of the model architecture are:

HyperparameterValue
n_layers16
n_heads16
n_query_groups8
n_embd1536
vocab size32000
sequence length8192

Usage

To use the model with the transformers library on a machine with GPUs, first make sure you have the transformers library installed.

pip install transformers>=4.42.3
import torch
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline(
    "text-generation",
    model="h2oai/h2o-danube3-500m-chat",
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
    device_map="auto",
)

# We use the HF Tokenizer chat template to format each message
# https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main/en/chat_templating
messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Why is drinking water so healthy?"},
]
prompt = pipe.tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    tokenize=False,
    add_generation_prompt=True,
)
res = pipe(
    prompt,
    return_full_text=False,
    max_new_tokens=256,
)
print(res[0]["generated_text"])

This will apply and run the correct prompt format out of the box:

Alternatively, one can also run it via:

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_name = "h2oai/h2o-danube3-500m-chat"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(
    model_name,
)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_name,
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
    device_map="auto",
    trust_remote_code=True,
)

messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Why is drinking water so healthy?"},
]
prompt = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    tokenize=False,
    add_generation_prompt=True,
)
inputs = tokenizer(
    prompt, return_tensors="pt", add_special_tokens=False
).to("cuda")

# generate configuration can be modified to your needs
tokens = model.generate(
    input_ids=inputs["input_ids"],
    attention_mask=inputs["attention_mask"],
    min_new_tokens=2,
    max_new_tokens=256,
)[0]

tokens = tokens[inputs["input_ids"].shape[1]:]
answer = tokenizer.decode(tokens, skip_special_tokens=True)
print(answer)

Quantization and sharding

You can load the models using quantization by specifying load_in_8bit=True or load_in_4bit=True. Also, sharding on multiple GPUs is possible by setting device_map=auto.

Model Architecture

LlamaForCausalLM(
  (model): LlamaModel(
    (embed_tokens): Embedding(32000, 1536, padding_idx=0)
    (layers): ModuleList(
      (0-15): 16 x LlamaDecoderLayer(
        (self_attn): LlamaSdpaAttention(
          (q_proj): Linear(in_features=1536, out_features=1536, bias=False)
          (k_proj): Linear(in_features=1536, out_features=768, bias=False)
          (v_proj): Linear(in_features=1536, out_features=768, bias=False)
          (o_proj): Linear(in_features=1536, out_features=1536, bias=False)
          (rotary_emb): LlamaRotaryEmbedding()
        )
        (mlp): LlamaMLP(
          (gate_proj): Linear(in_features=1536, out_features=4096, bias=False)
          (up_proj): Linear(in_features=1536, out_features=4096, bias=False)
          (down_proj): Linear(in_features=4096, out_features=1536, bias=False)
          (act_fn): SiLU()
        )
        (input_layernorm): LlamaRMSNorm()
        (post_attention_layernorm): LlamaRMSNorm()
      )
    )
    (norm): LlamaRMSNorm()
  )
  (lm_head): Linear(in_features=1536, out_features=32000, bias=False)
)

Benchmarks

🤗 Open LLM Leaderboard v1

Benchmarkacc_n
Average40.71
ARC-challenge39.25
Hellaswag61.02
MMLU26.33
TruthfulQA39.96
Winogrande61.72
GSM8K16.00

MT-Bench

First Turn: 4.16
Second Turn: 2.40
Average: 3.28

Disclaimer

Please read this disclaimer carefully before using the large language model provided in this repository. Your use of the model signifies your agreement to the following terms and conditions.

  • Biases and Offensiveness: The large language model is trained on a diverse range of internet text data, which may contain biased, racist, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate content. By using this model, you acknowledge and accept that the generated content may sometimes exhibit biases or produce content that is offensive or inappropriate. The developers of this repository do not endorse, support, or promote any such content or viewpoints.
  • Limitations: The large language model is an AI-based tool and not a human. It may produce incorrect, nonsensical, or irrelevant responses. It is the user's responsibility to critically evaluate the generated content and use it

From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys h2o-danube3 for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (h2o-danube3 below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)

$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"h2o-danube3","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'

Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 3M free tokens every 30 days with every new account.

© 2026 AxForge · EU-hosted AI infrastructure Pricing Docs Trust Privacy Terms