Olmo 3: Charting a path through the model flow to lead open-source AI

> the best fully open 32B-scale thinking model

It's absolutely fantastic that they're releasing an actually OSS model, but isn't "the best fully open" a bit of a low bar? I'm not aware of any other fully open models.

Yeah. There are other fully open models like Hugging Face SmolLM but they are not common.

Well if open source is one of your USP, then better mention that right? Open Source people tend to also like that their work is.. open source.

And otherwise you 1on1 start competing with notsoOpenAI, or say Llama.

My observation was more on "best", rather than on "fully open". It's like Apple saying "this is the best iPhone" for every new iPhone.

You need to learn to walk before you can run.

Switzerland, through EPFL, ETH Zurich, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, has released a complete pipeline with all training data - that is "fully open", to my understanding.

See https://www.swiss-ai.org/apertus for details.

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/07/a-l... was the press release.

All the data used by Apertus is just data processed or generated by American companies(NVidia, Apple and huggingface mostly). They didn't release any new data.

Olmo and HF not only processed the data to address language bias, they also publish lot of data augmentation results including European language performance. European LLMs just claim that language bias is the motivator.

AFSIK, when they use the term "fully open", they mean open dataset and open training code. The Olmo series of models are the only mainstream models out there that satisfy this requirement, hence the clause.

> We go beyond just releasing model weights - we provide our training code, training data, our model weights, and our recipes.

https://docs.allenai.org/#truly-open

Yes, and that's why saying this is "the best" is a tautology. If it's the only one, it's obviously the best, and the worst, and everything.

There's a lot of fully open models made by hobbyists and some by researchers. If you've only heard of this one, it's likely because this one is the closest to being competitive with closed models.

Olmo author here… would be nice to have some more competition!! I don’t like that we are so lonely either.

We are competitive with open weights models in general, just a couple points behind best Qwen.

Fully open models are important for research community; a lot of fundamental discoveries are made when you have access to training data. We call out we are the best fully open model because researchers would want to know about that.

Makes sense, thanks!

(I'm a researcher on Olmo.)

There's a bunch of other fully open models, including the [Marin](https://marin.community/) series of models out of Stanford and Nvidia regularly releases fully open models.