K2 Horizon
Shares rank 33 of 39 open-weight language models by recommenders
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.
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.
14 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 57%
Recommended in 2 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 2 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Close to truly open source
“I'm glad to see some development in the space of "truly open" models that share training data and other recipes.”
Comment from 3 Sep 2026 in “K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models” “it seems to be really close to actual open source”
Comment from 19 Oct 2026 in “DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max)” Impressive releases, especially the 7B
“these releases are a technological miracle”
Comment from 3 Sep 2026 in “K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models” “The 7B does look very, very good however.”
Comment from 3 Sep 2026 in “K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Larger models underperform the 7B
“The 32b and 36b models are inferior to qwen 3.8 27b”
Comment from 3 Sep 2026 in “K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models” “32B performs worse than the 7B model”
Comment from 3 Sep 2026 in “K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models” Disappointing results overall
“does not result in a model that has remotely any frontier capability”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI” “the results were depressing”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI”
Other open-weight language models people recommend
The four most recommended other open-weight language models, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen 3.8 27B | 1,173 | 426 | 73% | 13 | 2 mo32 owners | Approved |
| Z.ai GLM | 1,043 | 384 | 73% | 13 | 2 mo52 owners | Approved |
| Kimi | 931 | 359 | 72% | 13 | 1 mo26 owners | Approved |
| Gemma 4 | 713 | 249 | 74% | 13 | 1 mo14 owners | Approved |
| K2 HorizonThis page | 8 | 6 | 57% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
14 of the 16 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“it seems to be really close to actual open source”
“does not result in a model that has remotely any frontier capability”
“the results were depressing”
“The 32b and 36b models are inferior to qwen 3.8 27b”
“The first attempt with 7B the model got stuck in an infinite loop.”
“I'm glad to see some development in the space of "truly open" models that share training data and other recipes.”
“it's not to be trusted for coding”
“It is odd to me, though, that they didn't run the same benchmark suite for the various quants.”
“these releases are a technological miracle”
“32B performs worse than the 7B model”
“The 7B does look very, very good however.”
“the headline claims do not match the self-reported performance”
“both repositories for pre-training and post-training are actually empty”
“immediately hit with http login”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.