Model reference · open weights
helium-1 is an open-weight language model from kyutai. 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
| Maker | kyutai |
|---|---|
| Type | Language models |
| Task | Text gen |
| Parameters (lead) | 2.2B |
| Runs with | transformers |
| Released | 2025-01-13 |
| Popularity | 11k downloads / month |
| Licence | Open weights |
About
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
From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.
Using it via the API
Once AxForge deploys helium-1 for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (helium-1 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":"helium-1","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'
Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 5M tokens/month currently included with every new account at launch.