tech
January 28, 2026
Tiny startup Arcee AI built a 400B open source LLM from scratch to best Meta's Llama
30-person startup Arcee AI has released a 400B model called Trinity, which it says is one of the biggest open source foundation models from a US company.
TL;DR
- Arcee AI, a 30-person startup, has released Trinity, a 400B parameter, open-source foundation model under the Apache license.
- Trinity is positioned as a competitor to models from Big Tech companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as models from China.
- The model currently supports only text but has plans for multimodal capabilities, including vision and speech-to-text.
- Arcee AI aims to attract developers and academics by offering a permanently open-source alternative, contrasting with Meta's Llama license.
- The company trained Trinity and two smaller models (Trinity Mini and Trinity Nano) in six months for $20 million.
- Trinity models are available for free download in various versions, including a base model and an instruct model.