Aya 23 8B

Aya 23 8B is the smaller of two open weights models released in May 2024 by Cohere for AI, the company's nonprofit research lab. Where the earlier Aya 101 chased breadth across 101 languages, Aya 23 focuses on depth: 23 languages with far more capacity allocated per language, built by pairing a performant pretrained model from the Command family with the large Aya instruction dataset collection.

Cohere reported a 41 percent improvement over Aya 101 on multilingual MMLU and stronger results than Gemma and Mistral class models on discriminative and generative tasks. The 8B variant is aimed at researchers on consumer grade hardware, while a 35B sibling serves heavier workloads. Weights are released under a CC-BY-NC license, so commercial use is restricted, a caveat to check before production plans.