Maximilian Jeblick

Arno Candel, Jon McKinney, Philipp Singer et al.

Applications built on top of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 represent a revolution in AI due to their human-level capabilities in natural language processing. However, they also pose many significant risks such as the presence of biased, private, or harmful text, and the unauthorized inclusion of copyrighted material. We introduce h2oGPT, a suite of open-source code repositories for the creation and use of LLMs based on Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs). The goal of this project is to create the world's best truly open-source alternative to closed-source approaches. In collaboration with and as part of the incredible and unstoppable open-source community, we open-source several fine-tuned h2oGPT models from 7 to 40 Billion parameters, ready for commercial use under fully permissive Apache 2.0 licenses. Included in our release is 100\% private document search using natural language. Open-source language models help boost AI development and make it more accessible and trustworthy. They lower entry hurdles, allowing people and groups to tailor these models to their needs. This openness increases innovation, transparency, and fairness. An open-source strategy is needed to share AI benefits fairly, and H2O.ai will continue to democratize AI and LLMs.

Arno Candel, Jon McKinney, Philipp Singer et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a revolution in AI. However, they also pose many significant risks, such as the presence of biased, private, copyrighted or harmful text. For this reason we need open, transparent and safe solutions. We introduce a complete open-source ecosystem for developing and testing LLMs. The goal of this project is to boost open alternatives to closed-source approaches. We release h2oGPT, a family of fine-tuned LLMs of diverse sizes. We also introduce H2O LLM Studio, a framework and no-code GUI designed for efficient fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment of LLMs using the most recent state-of-the-art techniques. Our code and models are fully open-source. We believe this work helps to boost AI development and make it more accessible, efficient and trustworthy. The demo is available at: https://gpt.h2o.ai/

Simon Jegou, Maximilian Jeblick

Growing context lengths in transformer-based language models have made the key-value (KV) cache a critical inference bottleneck. While many KV cache pruning methods have been proposed, they have not yet been adopted in major inference engines due to speed--accuracy trade-offs. We introduce KVzap, a fast, input-adaptive approximation of KVzip that works in both prefilling and decoding. On Qwen3-8B, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, and Qwen3-32B across long-context and reasoning tasks, KVzap achieves $2$--$4\times$ KV cache compression with negligible accuracy loss and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KVpress leaderboard. Code and models are available at https://github.com/NVIDIA/kvpress.

Philipp Singer, Pascal Pfeiffer, Yauhen Babakhin et al.

We present H2O-Danube, a series of small 1.8B language models consisting of H2O-Danube-1.8B, trained on 1T tokens, and the incremental improved H2O-Danube2-1.8B trained on an additional 2T tokens. Our models exhibit highly competitive metrics across a multitude of benchmarks and, as of the time of this writing, H2O-Danube2-1.8B achieves the top ranking on Open LLM Leaderboard for all models below the 2B parameter range. The models follow core principles of LLama 2 and Mistral, and we leverage and refine various techniques for pre-training large language models. We additionally release chat models trained with supervised fine-tuning followed by direct preference optimization. We make all models openly available under Apache 2.0 license further democratizing LLMs to a wider audience economically.