Model reference · open weights
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.
Summary of the kyutai/helium-1-preview-2b model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | kyutai |
|---|---|
| Released | 2025-01-13 |
| Parameters | 2.2B |
| VRAM | 4.3 GB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Requests at once | Context max | Memory |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4K each | |||
| RTX 3060 12 GB | 6 | all 4K | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | 10 | all 4K | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | 18 | all 4K | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | 18 | all 4K | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | 25 | all 4K | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | 38 | all 4K | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | 72 | all 4K | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | 69 | all 4K | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | 85 | all 4K | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | 98 | all 4K | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | 129 | all 4K | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | 166 | all 4K | 176 GB |
| 2× RTX 3060 12 GB tensor parallel | 17 | all 4K | 11.6 GB a card |
| Requests at once | 4K tokens each |
|---|---|
| 1 | 5.9 GB |
| 5 | 10.0 GB |
| 8 | 13.0 GB |
| 16 | 21.0 GB |
| 32 | 37.1 GB |
| 64 | 69.3 GB |
One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.
From the model card
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.
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.
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.
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.
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")
Helium-1 preview was trained on a mix of data including: Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, open-access scientific articles (from peS2o) and Common Crawl.
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.
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.
| Benchmark | Helium-1 Preview | HF SmolLM2 (1.7B) | Gemma-2 (2.6B) | Llama-3.2 (3B) | Qwen2.5 (1.5B) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU | 51.2 | 50.4 | 53.1 | 56.6 | 61.0 |
| NQ | 17.3 | 15.1 | 17.7 | 22.0 | 13.1 |
| TQA | 47.9 | 45.4 | 49.9 | 53.6 | 35.9 |
| ARC E | 80.9 | 81.8 | 81.1 | 84.6 | 89.7 |
| ARC C | 62.7 | 64.7 | 66.0 | 69.0 | 77.2 |
| OBQA | 63.8 | 61.4 | 64.6 | 68.4 | 73.8 |
| CSQA | 65.6 | 59.0 | 64.4 | 65.4 | 72.4 |
| PIQA | 77.4 | 77.7 | 79.8 | 78.9 | 76.0 |
| SIQA | 64.4 | 57.5 | 61.9 | 63.8 | 68.7 |
| HS | 69.7 | 73.2 | 74.7 | 76.9 | 67.5 |
| WG | 66.5 | 65.6 | 71.2 | 72.0 | 64.8 |
| Average | 60.7 | 59.3 | 62.2 | 64.7 | 63.6 |
| Language | Benchmark | Helium-1 Preview | HF SmolLM2 (1.7B) | Gemma-2 (2.6B) | Llama-3.2 (3B) | Qwen2.5 (1.5B) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German | MMLU | 45.6 | 35.3 | 45.0 | 47.5 | 49.5 |
| ARC C | 56.7 | 38.4 | 54.7 | 58.3 | 60.2 | |
| HS | 53.5 | 33.9 | 53.4 | 53.7 | 42.8 | |
| MKQA | 16.1 | 7.1 | 18.9 | 20.2 | 10.4 | |
| FLORES | 33.9 | 12.2 | 30.7 | 28.2 | 20.8 | |
| Spanish | MMLU | 46.5 | 38.9 | 46.2 | 49.6 | 52.8 |
| ARC C | 58.3 | 43.2 | 58.8 | 60.0 | 68.1 | |
| HS | 58.6 | 40.8 | 60.5 | 61.1 | 51.4 | |
| MKQA | 16.0 | 7.9 | 18.5 | 20.6 | 10.6 | |
| FLORES | 25.7 | 15.0 | 25.7 | 23.7 | 20.4 | |
| French | MMLU | 46.0 | 37.7 | 45.7 | 48.8 | 51.9 |
| ARC C | 57.9 | 40.6 | 57.5 | 60.1 | 67.4 | |
| HS | 59.0 | 41.1 | 60.4 | 59.6 | 51.2 | |
| MKQA | 16.8 | 8.4 | 18.4 | 19.6 | 9.7 | |
| FLORES | 44.3 | 20.0 | 43.3 | 39.3 | 31.2 | |
| Italian | MMLU | 46.1 | 36.3 | 45.6 | 48.8 | 50.5 |
| ARC C | 57.4 | 39.1 | 53.9 | 60.1 | 64.6 | |
| HS | 55.2 | 37.7 | 56.2 | 56.8 | 46.8 | |
| MKQA | 15.3 | 6.3 | 18.0 | 19.0 | 9.9 | |
| FLORES | 25.8 | 10.4 | 25.2 | 23.8 | 16.4 | |
| Portuguese | MMLU | 46.2 | 37.7 | 45.6 | 49.2 | 53.0 |
| ARC C | 56.8 | 40.6 | 57.0 | 62.1 | 66.6 | |
| HS | 57.3 | 41.0 | 58.7 | 59.1 | 50.9 | |
| MKQA | 14.7 | 6.6 | 16.9 | 19.1 | 9.2 | |
| FLORES | 43.0 | 20.0 | 43.6 | 40.5 | 33.0 | |
| Average | 42.1 | 27.8 | 42.3 | 43.6 | 40.0 |
| Hyperparameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Layers | 24 |
| Heads | 20 |
| Model dimension | 2560 |
| MLP dimension | 7040 |
| Context size | 4096 |
| Theta RoPE | 100,000 |
The model was trained on 128 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.
The model was trained using Jax.
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.