# Kolibri-1 (78B)

> Aleph Alpha's German-English reasoning model uses 50 MoE blocks with a 4:1 mix of sliding-window and global GQA.

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Lab | Aleph Alpha (Germany) |
| Released | 2026-10-03 |
| Decoder type | Sparse MoE |
| Family | Sparse MoE |
| Scale | 78B total, 3.46B active (4.4% active) |
| Context window | 262,144 native; 1,048,576 extrapolated tokens |
| Attention | GQA with QK-Norm and 4:1 sliding-window/global attention |
| Layer mix | 40 sliding-window + 10 global GQA |
| KV cache / token (bf16) | 100 KiB (Moderate) |
| License | Apache License 2.0 |

**Key detail:** Uses top-6 routing over 384 experts plus one shared expert, with sandwich RMSNorm, RoPE in local layers, and NoPE in global layers.

## Architecture concepts

- [Grouped-Query Attention (GQA)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/gqa.md): Several query heads share one key/value head, shrinking the KV cache with little quality loss.
- [Sliding Window Attention (SWA)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/swa.md): Some layers only attend to a local window of recent tokens instead of the whole context.
- [Mixture of Experts (MoE)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/moe.md): Many feed-forward experts, but a router sends each token to only a few of them.
- [QK-Norm (QK-Norm)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/qk-norm.md): RMSNorm applied to queries and keys before attention to keep logits well-behaved.
- [No Positional Embeddings (NoPE)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/nope.md): Some or all layers drop explicit positional encodings and rely on the causal mask.

## Links

- Architecture diagram: https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/images/architectures/kolibri-1.webp
- config.json: https://huggingface.co/Aleph-Alpha/Kolibri-1/blob/main/config.json
- Tech report: https://aleph-alpha.com/downloads/tech-report.pdf
- Source card (source of truth): https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/#card-kolibri-1-78b
- Web page: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/models/kolibri-1-78b/
- JSON: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/api/models/kolibri-1-78b.json

_Data from Sebastian Raschka's LLM Architecture Gallery (https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/). Synced 2026-11-04._