Ai2's Bolmo byte-level language models are published in Nature

Ai2 has published its Bolmo byte-level language model research in Nature and released new checkpoints on Hugging Face.

The byteifying process converts an existing subword model into a byte-level one with a relatively short additional training run, and the paper reports that it also works for Qwen 3 8B and Llama 3 8B, producing Bwen 8B and Blama 8B. Ai2 also released Stage 1 checkpoints for researchers extending the architecture.