Ai2 releases Bwen-8B-Stage1, a byte-level Qwen3-8B retrofit under Apache 2.0

Ai2 has released Bwen-8B-Stage1 on Hugging Face, a byte-level autoregressive model retrofitted from Qwen3-8B-Base through a short additional training procedure. This Stage 1 checkpoint contains only Stage 1 training, with inner model parameters unchanged, and is licensed under Apache 2.0 for research and educational use.