“My armor is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail is a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!”

That was the words of the main antagonist in one of The Hobbit films, the huge dragon that almost killed our dear protagonist Bilbo while scaring him to death.
Now, the same feeling might have been felt by the open-source community as Abacus.ai has released Smaug, a fine-tuned version of Qwen_72B by Alibaba that is unequivocally the new open-source king, and the first open-source model in history to reach an average of 80 points across benchmarks.
Also, it’s undeniable proof that we finally have a canonical method that will close the gap between open-source and proprietary models, DPO, which we talked about in my newsletter a few weeks ago.
Let’s unpack the secrets of the new king under the mountain.

This insight and others have mostly been previously shared in my weekly newsletter, TheTechOasis.
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A Thing of Beauty

First and foremost, you don’t have to take my word that this is the best open-source model, as it already appears as such in the famous Open LLM leaderboard from HuggingFace.
And although Alibaba is the one who grants the license (it’s not a truly open license like Apache 2.0) it’s fairly permissive, meaning you only have to request permission to use it commercially if your product has more than 100 million users.
I’m sure you can accept that.
So, what is Smaug?
Smaug is a fine-tuned, DPO-aligned version of Qwen-72B, a great Large Language Model (LLM) by the Alibaba group that is heavily…