# K2 Horizon

8 Hacker News commenters recommended K2 Horizon and 6 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 2 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Open model family praised for sharing training data and recipes and for its 7B model; critics say headline benchmark claims do not match self-reported results and larger models underperform.

## Why people recommend it

- Close to truly open source (2 comments): "I'm glad to see some development in the space of "truly open" models that share training data and other recipes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49555061)) "it seems to be really close to actual open source" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50148800))
- Impressive releases, especially the 7B (2 comments): "these releases are a technological miracle" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49554389)) "The 7B does look very, very good however." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49553364))

## What people warn about

- Larger models underperform the 7B (2 comments): "The 32b and 36b models are inferior to qwen 3.8 27b" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49558499)) "32B performs worse than the 7B model" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49553673))
- Disappointing results overall (2 comments): "does not result in a model that has remotely any frontier capability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49569695)) "the results were depressing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49569264))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Qwen 3.8 27B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen-3-8-27b.md): 1173 recommend
- [Z.ai GLM](https://hackerapproved.com/p/glm-5-2.md): 1043 recommend
- [Kimi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kimi-k3.md): 931 recommend
- [Gemma 4](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemma-4.md): 713 recommend
- [Qwen](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen.md): 474 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "K2 Horizon", https://hackerapproved.com/p/k2-horizon/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).