Model reference · open weights

helium-1

LLMs kyutai Text gen 1 build Open weights 11k dl/mo

helium-1 is an open-weight language model from kyutai. helium-1-preview-2b (BF16) weighs 4.3 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • Helium-1 is a 2.2B parameter base language model developed by Kyutai for text generation on edge and mobile devices.
  • It supports English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish with a context size of 4096 tokens.
  • The model is released under the CC-BY 4.0 license and is intended for research and development, requiring alignment for downstream use.

Summary of the kyutai/helium-1-preview-2b model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bykyutai
Released2025-01-13
Parameters2.2B
VRAM4.3 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for helium-1-preview-2b (BF16)

4.3 GBweights, file size
246 MBcache per 1K tokens
578 MBruntime overhead, at least
4,096 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
4K each
RTX 3060 12 GB6all 4K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB10all 4K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB18all 4K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB18all 4K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB25all 4K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB38all 4K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB72all 4K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB69all 4K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB85all 4K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified98all 4K107 GB
H200 141 GB129all 4K138 GB
B200 180 GB166all 4K176 GB
2× RTX 3060 12 GB
tensor parallel
17all 4K11.6 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once4K tokens each
15.9 GB
510.0 GB
813.0 GB
1621.0 GB
3237.1 GB
6469.3 GB

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

From the model card

What kyutai says about helium-1

Read the model card

Model Details

Model Description

Helium-1 preview is a lightweight language model with 2B parameters, targeting edge and mobile devices. It supports the following languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish.

⚠️ Helium-1 Preview is a base model, which was not fine-tuned to follow instructions or human preferences. For most downstream use cases, the model should be aligned with supervised fine-tuning, RLHF or related methods.

  • Developed by: Kyutai
  • Model type: Large Language Model
  • Language(s) (NLP): English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish
  • License: CC-BY 4.0

Uses

Direct Use

The intended use of the Helium model is research and development of natural language processing systems, including but not limited to language generation and understanding. The model can be used in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. For most downstream use cases, the model should be aligned with supervised fine-tuning, RLHF or related methods.

Out-of-Scope Use

The model should not be used in other languages than the ones on which it was trained. The model is not intended to be used for any malicious or illegal activities of any kind. The model was not fine-tuned to follow instructions, and thus should not be used as such.

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

Helium-1 preview is a base language model, which was not aligned to human preferences. As such, the model can generate incorrect, biased, harmful or generally unhelpful content. Thus, the model should not be used for downstream applications without further alignment, evaluations and mitigations of risks.

How to Get Started with the Model

Use the code below to get started with the model.

import torch
from transformers import pipeline

model_id = "kyutai/helium-1-preview-2b"

pipe = pipeline(
    "text-generation",
    model=model_id,
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
    device_map="auto"
)

text = pipe("Hello, today is a great day to")

Training Details

Training Data

Helium-1 preview was trained on a mix of data including: Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, open-access scientific articles (from peS2o) and Common Crawl.

Evaluation

Testing Data

The model was evaluated on MMLU, TriviaQA, NaturalQuestions, ARC Easy & Challenge, Open Book QA, Common Sense QA, Physical Interaction QA, Social Interaction QA, HellaSwag, WinoGrande, Multilingual Knowledge QA, FLORES 200.

Metrics

We report accuracy on MMLU, ARC, OBQA, CSQA, PIQA, SIQA, HellaSwag, WinoGrande. We report exact match on TriviaQA, NQ and MKQA. We report BLEU on FLORES.

English Results
BenchmarkHelium-1 PreviewHF SmolLM2 (1.7B)Gemma-2 (2.6B)Llama-3.2 (3B)Qwen2.5 (1.5B)
MMLU51.250.453.156.661.0
NQ17.315.117.722.013.1
TQA47.945.449.953.635.9
ARC E80.981.881.184.689.7
ARC C62.764.766.069.077.2
OBQA63.861.464.668.473.8
CSQA65.659.064.465.472.4
PIQA77.477.779.878.976.0
SIQA64.457.561.963.868.7
HS69.773.274.776.967.5
WG66.565.671.272.064.8
Average60.759.362.264.763.6
Multilingual Results
LanguageBenchmarkHelium-1 PreviewHF SmolLM2 (1.7B)Gemma-2 (2.6B)Llama-3.2 (3B)Qwen2.5 (1.5B)
GermanMMLU45.635.345.047.549.5
ARC C56.738.454.758.360.2
HS53.533.953.453.742.8
MKQA16.17.118.920.210.4
FLORES33.912.230.728.220.8
SpanishMMLU46.538.946.249.652.8
ARC C58.343.258.860.068.1
HS58.640.860.561.151.4
MKQA16.07.918.520.610.6
FLORES25.715.025.723.720.4
FrenchMMLU46.037.745.748.851.9
ARC C57.940.657.560.167.4
HS59.041.160.459.651.2
MKQA16.88.418.419.69.7
FLORES44.320.043.339.331.2
ItalianMMLU46.136.345.648.850.5
ARC C57.439.153.960.164.6
HS55.237.756.256.846.8
MKQA15.36.318.019.09.9
FLORES25.810.425.223.816.4
PortugueseMMLU46.237.745.649.253.0
ARC C56.840.657.062.166.6
HS57.341.058.759.150.9
MKQA14.76.616.919.19.2
FLORES43.020.043.640.533.0
Average42.127.842.343.640.0

Technical Specifications

Model Architecture and Objective

HyperparameterValue
Layers24
Heads20
Model dimension2560
MLP dimension7040
Context size4096
Theta RoPE100,000
Hardware

The model was trained on 128 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.

Software

The model was trained using Jax.

Citation

Blog post: https://kyutai.org/2025/01/13/helium.html

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

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