Ripple-65B Preview: U.S. Open-Weight SOTA on Agentic Coding (ricursive.com)
302 points by Philpax 17 hours ago
advael 16 hours ago
Category narrowing to this degree really has diluted the term "SOTA" quite a lot
You mean it's state of the art for this subset of benchmarks you're targeting? No? Well surely it's state of the art for models of a certain size category? Huh, what about models that are available for local inference? O, state of the art for open models of a certain size made in the US specifically. Uh. Neat!
gpm 15 hours ago
Playing games like this also makes it very easy to accidentally say things that aren't true, like in the headline of the article...
> Introducing Ripple-65B Preview, a Frontier Open-Weight Model
It's not "frontier", it's not "frontier" even in the category of open-weight models (though usually that phrasing would mean frontier over all, and also open weight)... it's only "frontier" in the small sub-category of US made open-weight models.
GuB-42 14 hours ago
It is technically frontier, if by "frontier" we mean the Pareto frontier.
Being at the Pareto frontier means that you can't get something better on one aspect without compromising on some other aspect. The trick is that it is easy to be at the Pareto frontier by having enough dimensions.
Here, we have 4: score, number of parameters, origin (US) and open-weight. You can get a better score or a lower number of parameters, but you have to compromise on at least one of the other aspects. That's a pretty weak frontier if you ask me.
derefr 13 hours ago
quixoticelixer- 13 hours ago
Fourth most popular comedy folk rock duo
hkt 12 hours ago
..in New Zealand!
yorwba 15 hours ago
AFAIK the currently biggest US open-weight model is Inkling, which they include in the comparison, so at least their claim is not limited to a size category. Still they score 0.42 percentage points higher than the second-best model on their chosen benchmark, so it's hardly a meaningful lead.
msy 2 hours ago
It's like the Baseball World Series of Frontier models. It's SOTA in the same way Tesla are SOTA EVs - the best you're permitted to buy in the USA.
frinxor 15 hours ago
The US bit got me as well.
I guess it makes sense - there is a segmentation where users may want to run on domestic "frontier LLMs."
twelvechairs 12 hours ago
Why should US or China matter if its open weights? Its going to matter a whole lot more whether you are running it locally or where your provider is surely.
[Edit i think the preferred combination for those who actually want some data security at the moment and arent at the scale of self hosting llms is chinese open weight models served in germany or France where theres some better data privacy/security]
aftbit 7 hours ago
dragonwriter 6 hours ago
mcnewcp 8 hours ago
lynx97 3 hours ago
mettamage 4 hours ago
I’m SOTA on being exactly who I am.
Yep, you’re right. Quite easy to dilute the term.
visarga 16 hours ago
No, the term is well defined. It means being on the Pareto curve of performance vs size, such as: https://tinyurl.com/26sw35fw
advael 15 hours ago
Irrelevant. A term can be well-defined and used correctly while also being diluted. In this case, I am pointing out that it's diluted by narrowing the category in which the claim is being made. I have no doubt that in this narrowed category, the term is being used correctly. This has no bearing on the fact that by narrowing the category in that way, this claim is made remarkably less impressive or interesting to many people hearing it, including myself
vikramkr 11 hours ago
Terms can have multiple definitions and language is descriptive not prescriptive. If you intend to communicate that you mean "Pareto frontier" in the current context you need to include the word "pareto." If you don't then "frontier" will be understood as referring to mythos/astra/opus 5.5 tier models in intelligence (max capability regardless of tradeoffs). It doesn't matter that the second definition in the dictionary is the one you want to convey (charitably assuming you're not trying to mislead given the value of the hype of being able to call your model a frontier model) if your audience understands what you're saying to mean the first definiton.
XnoiVeX 8 hours ago
Frontier and SOTA usually mean that something is on the edge of what's possible. The bleeding edge.
bastawhiz 11 hours ago
Is it really on the pareto curve if you get to define arbitrary conditions for what other models are plotted on the curve?
O_H_E 15 hours ago
well yes but the y axis heavily depends on the benchmark you choose
epolanski 15 hours ago
By...whom? An ISO standard? Highly cited scientific literature?
A tinyurl pic linked by randoms over the internet?
swiftcoder 15 hours ago
For sure, but unfortunately, there's a non-zero chance the state department at some point makes the "US" part of this mandatory for a bunch of companies.
dev_l1x_be 15 hours ago
State of the AI-Apocalypse.
cyanydeez 12 hours ago
It means ot was released recently.
It was already meaningless when US labs used it.
It means new.
stewartpark 15 hours ago
It's great to see another competitive open weight model. Congratulations!
But as is, it's probably hard to become popular amongst hobbyists and local model enthusiasts like Qwen's 27B class models or MOE models because it's a 65B dense model and inference will be prohibitively slow on consumer grade hardware, and seems like the goal/mission of the company behind this model is to automate chip design.
So if I have to assume and connect the dots, this is for the companies who want to use AI in air-gapped environments for chip design so that they protect their IPs (not leaking to third party AI labs/hostile parties) and can afford lots of server grade inference hardware for a quick unlock with the big dense model.
Neat!
0x00cl 13 hours ago
Maybe is a bit more niche, but I'm pretty sure there is plenty of people who have enough RAM to run dense models like this one, I don't know how slow is slow but people are willing to sacrifice speed if it means they get a good model running locally.
Look at "SC117/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-GSQ-RCO-abliterated-GGUF" on HuggingFace, It says it has 3.5M downloads this month and its offering a model that is 2-bit and 3-bit quantized (66GB - 83.9GB).
If this gets quantized to 4-bit (Q4_0) which usually there is very little loss in intelligence compared to the base model, then the model will probably be around 40GB, and looking that people are downloading a model that is at least 20GB bigger, then it might allow even more people to run a bigger model.
But it will only be popular among hobbyist if its as good as it claims to be.
sorenjan 13 hours ago
Qwen 3.8 Flash Next is a mixture of experts model though. It has 6B active parameters per token, so you can cache large parts of the model in RAM and move it in and out of VRAM as needed. If you do that with a dense model it gets much slower.
Tade0 11 hours ago
stewartpark 13 hours ago
I hear what you're saying - there are people who will use it even at 0.1 tokens/s and run tasks over night or over multiple days if it is good. but Qwen3.8 Flash Next is a MoE model (6B active) so the memory bandwidth/compute required to calculate each token is very different from a 65B (meaning, 65B all active) dense model!
deepsquirrelnet 10 hours ago
> it's a 65B dense model and inference will be prohibitively slow on consumer grade hardware
Times are changing and with MTP and DFLASH, dense models are back in style. For qwen 3.8 27b, you can get great token generation rates with MTP and for quality, it's much better than a MoE of comparable size.
stewartpark 9 hours ago
That helps, yes. But speculative decoding that requires a secondary/draft model means a trade off (smaller KV pool), so often times the only option left is MTP unless you have lots of VRAM. And as you already know, these options (MTP, DFlash, DSpark, etc) are also available for MoE models, too. If it's 3tk/s instead of 1tk/s, we can say it helps but not sure how many people would be excited about that. I'd be more excited about 150tk/s instead of 50tk/s!
59nadir 15 hours ago
Is it competitive overall or just competitive when compared to "U.S. Open-Weight models that are otherwise pretty decent at agentic coding"? The latter does not imply the former.
regularfry 15 hours ago
What'll be interesting is how it performs relative to Qwen3.8 27b when quantised to the same size. Which, of course, is a comparison they don't want to do.
40four 15 hours ago
Well, obviously. These newer American models aren’t competing with Qwen yet. They are competing for American businesses and organizations that can’t/won’t use Chinese models.
They are playing catch-up, but I’m happy to see new players to the game, and it will be interesting to watch how they develop
wmf 16 hours ago
Congratulations I guess but it's a pretty bad look to not even mention those other open weight models.
karmakaze 16 hours ago
What's funnier is that after cherry picking models for comparison, they further cherry picked Inking for size comparison instead of better and smaller Beam 1.0
The bar chart also shows Nemotron 3 Ultra instead of smaller and better Nemotron 3.5 Super.
tedivm 16 hours ago
We've always been at war with eurasia.
Seriously though, it's just easier to pretend that China doesn't exist when they're stomping us this badly.
stewartpark 15 hours ago
I think it's because the primary users of this model won't even look at "those other open weight models" as options. This is the right chart to present to those who would consider this model. (e.g. US Gov't agencies, chip design industry, etc etc)
flatline 16 hours ago
Right? These are not likely to be meaningful points of comparison to anyone but the authors.
wmf 16 hours ago
Maybe Palantir will use it or something. There probably is a market for US models but I don't know how large it will be.
Onawa 16 hours ago
schleck8 15 hours ago
Because Chinese models heavily rely on distillation and regularly behave strangely in public benchmarks (where they score much better than in private evaluations), even if many world class researchers are Chinese. It's difficult to quantify to what extend labs like Moonshot would be competitive if they could not distill from OpenAI, now that Anthropic mostly blocks it
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-astra-model-...
kevmo314 5 hours ago
It would also be pretty difficult to quantify to what extent labs like Anthropic would be competitive if they could not distill from human knowledge.
petcat 15 hours ago
Do those other models usually mention all the competition? I haven't noticed
pcwelder 3 hours ago
The hosted GMI cloud model on openrouter does not invoke confidence. Ignoring 131k context length limit the tool call failure rate is not acceptable.
When asked to call 'submit_html' tool for our bench it wrote the whole page as plain reply text, then called submit_html with "This is the complete submit trigger." 4/8 tools failed.
bluejay2387 15 hours ago
There are several situations where some of us are explicitly prohibited from using models from companies not under the jurisdiction of the United States. It doesn't mean these models are competitive when looked at from a global view but it is also not an irrelevant differentiation.
Computer0 14 hours ago
It's the same positioning Mistral makes.
2001zhaozhao 16 hours ago
This model scores 80.5 on Terminal Bench 2.1
For reference Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (which is bigger than this model but probably cheaper to run due to MoE) scores 84.3, and Qwen 3.8-27B scores 73.0.
I think this model could be competitive, depending on how much it was benchmaxxed compared to Qwen?
antoineMoPa 14 hours ago
I trained a tiny LLM earlier this year, it's fits under 10mb and it's completely useless, can I call it SOTA for my neighborhood?
kennywinker 8 hours ago
State of the Area
syntaxing 16 hours ago
When a post doesn’t mention Qwen for comparison, you know the performance isn’t going to be great.
ethan-boneh 16 hours ago
I mean Qwen 3.8 27B hits 73% on TB2.1 and 42.2% on DeepSWE....
a11r 14 hours ago
I understand the desire to look the best in some self defined category. But not showing any comparison against the actual leaders in open weight renders all of the benchmarking completely information-less for the actual end users (who care about real performance comparison against the real field).
namjh 7 hours ago
New model is always a good news!
However, the chart comparing the score-by-parameters with existing models is misleading, because the others are all MoE, and this model is not. The article describes it as an architectural decision to optimize against NVIDIA cards(which sounds reasonable, as US labs are relatively easy to gain access to these high-performance chips) but the chart should've been adjusted to reflect the difference, say, by using the heuristic that `effective param size ≈ sqrt(total param size * activiated param size` on MoEs.
minimaxa 15 hours ago
Agentic coding benchmarks look great.
I think we will find the market is going to move into omni multi-modal models: text, moe, agentic tasks, voice, images, and video all in one LLM.
soohamr 8 hours ago
Wasn't ricursive's sthick to automate EDA and chip design with LLMs? Why are they releasing open weight agentic coding models and benchmarking on everything but EDA and chip design?
ggcr 6 hours ago
I was also surprised to not find any benchmark for RTL in the model card. Wonder how it would score on - say, CVDP
monksy 5 hours ago
Looks like this may be the GGUF one: https://huggingface.co/AtomicChat/Ripple-65B-Preview-GGUF
RandyOrion 8 hours ago
Nice to see another open weight model.
I cannot evaluate how valuable this model is based on the performance table alone because the comparison is kind of narrow. Waiting for third-party benchmarks to provide more information.
I do not have the hardware to run it properly without super-heavy quantization (about q2). Besides, the architecture is not optimized for local usage (sliding window attention also requires KV cache). I think I will just move on.
thesnarkitecht 14 hours ago
Speaking as someone who has High-Memory Mac Studios, it is great that there is finally a model that will run at usable speeds with high quality. In my experience, the sweet spot for Mac Clusters is around 200GB of weights, which this is far under. Congratulations to the recursive team for building an open model that will actually run!
Tepix 12 hours ago
It will be slow on Macs, it's a dense model.
mark_l_watson 10 hours ago
Oh, I thought this was from the company recursive.com who released the very good for its size model Flint.
I am looking at the HF model page https://huggingface.co/ricursiveAI/Ripple-65B-Preview and it looks like I need to wait a day for an Apple Silicon version.
dofm 16 hours ago
So we have a Recursive and a Ricursive, both making LLMs?
wmf 16 hours ago
Time to start Rickursive, the lab that will never give you up and never let you down.
6thbit 15 hours ago
And it should acquire the existing two
neutronicus 15 hours ago
throwaw12 16 hours ago
we need RichUrsive
xyzrt 16 hours ago
One making self-improving AI via AI-chip co-design, the other relying only on software for self-improving AI.
dofm 16 hours ago
I hope they never have to call each other about anything. It could get confusing if neither knows who is the base case.
giwook 16 hours ago
There seems to be some recursion going on here.
purplemantis 15 hours ago
These are pretty odd benchmarks to use. Terminal Bench 2.1 is old. SWE-bench was disavowed by OpenAI. DeepSWE is clearly benchmark-hacked by Gemini.
aeternum 7 hours ago
Oh yeah well I trained a bloom filter on this agentic coding benchmark and it selects the right answer with 99% accuracy
zhiyan 8 hours ago
Looking forward to a "SOTA model from my basement". Make the category narrow enough, anybody can claim SOTA.
roundup 12 hours ago
Global open-weight SOTA ... https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3.1-Pro
hedora 8 hours ago
Kimi is not open weight. Go look at the license. It has a bunch of usage restrictions. (The same is true for qwen flash-next and larger).
Ripple-65B preview is apache-2.0, so actually open weight.
mrinterweb 14 hours ago
Not comparing to Qwen3.8 27B gives cherry-picked benchmark comparison energy. Still, Ripple-65B outscores Qwen3.8 27B, according to the reported benchmarks.
jszymborski 16 hours ago
Would love a 27B model. Wonder if we'll get a distillation.
soundworlds 15 hours ago
Not to be confused with https://recursive.com/
walrus01 11 hours ago
Showing a terminal bench 2.1 score at the top is very misleading when terminalbench 4.0 is the current metric as a very quick glance for anything we care about for 30B to 180B size possible to locally-host models.
RGS1811 16 hours ago
The comparison chart is befuddling.
kylehotchkiss 11 hours ago
Ouh this is the size of model I want to see more of (just got a 98gb m5u studio)
kylehotchkiss 12 hours ago
Ouh that fits right on a base M5U Studio! Excited to try it.
cyberax 14 hours ago
So the model is "meh" at best, but the cost of the training is interesting. So we can extrapolate that in 3 years the cost will be below $5m for a model like this.
It's very well within the capabilities of any reasonable organization, maybe even crowd-funded.
ltbarcly3 13 hours ago
What is this thing where model comparisons blatantly pick other crap models and show themselves at the top left (cheap and effective)? Put all the open models, or put all the cheap models, or whatever, but just cherry picking is egregious.
6thbit 16 hours ago
I'm sorry but what is "U.S." implying here?
Is this sponsored by the us gov? did it only train on US data? does it only work on the US?
conception 16 hours ago
It's a US group that made it, in the same vein that OpenAI and Anthropic have US models.
petcat 15 hours ago
It means that it's an American AI lab behind it.
mirekrusin 14 hours ago
...hiring Chinese people to do it.
kennywinker 8 hours ago
petcat 14 hours ago
signatoremo 15 hours ago
I think it’s the same as EU sovereign ones?