# Soofi S

6 Hacker News commenters recommended Soofi S and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 2 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended as an open source German model, competitive in its small-model class. Critics say it trains on benchmark test data and skips current top models.

## Why people recommend it

- Fully open source German model (2 comments): "It actually looks like an open source German model that might be useful!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903319)) "Apertus and Soofi, both open source (not only open weight) models" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027163))
- Competitive on benchmarks in its class (2 comments): "Soofi S and Apertus 1.5 outperform or are at least comparable to Ai2 depending on benchmarks." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223622)) "it's a small win in the small model class" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979854))

## What people warn about

- Omits current best comparable models (3 comments): "it's a shame when the benchmarks don't include the current best comparable models" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938968)) "Nice trick to be not comparable with most other LLMs on the market" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938911)) "I bet it's doing really well against Llama 3 :)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48939692))
- Trained on benchmark test data (4 comments): "they trained on 10 epochs of a "very light rephrasing" of EVERY gpqa diamond EVAL data" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48925912)) "More like Nemotron 3 with benchmaxxing enabled has (re-)entered the chat." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48939226)) "It's just nemotron with benchmark juicing and the sovereign smokescreen" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48980378))
- Seen as late and disappointing (2 comments): "this atm just feels like too little too late to be taken seriously" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48940267)) "Disappointing. Sounds like Volkswagen 2.0" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48939344))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Claude Opus](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-opus.md): 3331 recommend
- [OpenAI GPT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-5-5.md): 1205 recommend
- [Claude Sonnet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-sonnet.md): 854 recommend
- [DeepSeek V4 Flash](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-v4-flash.md): 828 recommend
- [Fable](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fable.md): 823 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Soofi S", https://hackerapproved.com/p/soofi-s/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).