Wainut launches open source AI model Walnoot for municipalities

AI service provider Wainut launched the open source model Walnoot on September 28. This initiative follows the removal of Claude Mythos due to U.S. export restrictions, highlighting the dependency on large tech companies. Wainut states that public sector clients have long been asking for sovereign solutions. The four-member core team works from Rotterdam and aims to provide an independent alternative.

Walnoot is positioned as a more compact model that is not intended to replace leading AI systems like Claude or ChatGPT. Instead, it focuses on efficiently performing specific, targeted tasks, such as extracting information from documents and organizing it into task applications. Initially, the plan was to build a prototype within a weekend, but the team extended the development time to a month to realize the first version.

The model, developed by Luciano Currie, is based on the Swiss base model Apertus, supplemented with elements from the publicly available corpus of GPT-NL. Wainut clarifies the construction of Walnoot by using analogies from car manufacturing, considering existing technologies as engine and fuel, while development methodologies like continuous pre-training and reinforcement learning are seen as the bodywork. Although the sovereignty layer of GPT-NL has been studied, Wainut made its own choices in the fundamental structure of Walnoot.

On the EuroEval circuit, Walnoot achieves better scores than the scores of GPT-NL, with a total of 8 billion parameters compared to 26 billion for GPT-NL. Wainut emphasizes that the focus is not on direct competition with GPT-NL, but on collaboration within the Netherlands. The broader AI market, including names like Claude Mythos and ChatGPT, remains challenging, especially given the discussion about access and performance. Despite the restoration of access to the American model, feelings of dependency persist. Wainut already serves clients such as municipalities, construction companies, and health insurers, and hopes to grow with Walnoot by collaborating with Dutch AI talent.

Read the full article from AI Insider.