Bielik 7B

Bielik 7B (v0.1) is the model that started Poland's open LLM movement: released in April 2024 by the SpeakLeash Foundation and Cyfronet AGH, it was the first large language model built specifically for Polish. Based on the Mistral 7B architecture and extended with Polish-focused training, it demonstrated that a community effort could produce a capable native-language model, and it seeded the Bielik family that later grew into the 11B v2 series and the v3 generation.

The honest picture: this is a historical entry. Bielik 7B v0.1 has been superseded by the much stronger Bielik 11B v2/v3 models and by PLLuM, and nobody should start a new project on the 2024 7B checkpoint. Its value in the catalog is as the origin point of the Polish sovereign-model ecosystem. Weights were released openly and permit commercial use, and quantized versions remain floating around for anyone studying the lineage. Exact release day is not documented; the April 2024 date is era-level.