IFM Hosts Reddit AMA on K2 Horizon Open Model Suite
Researchers from the Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) hosted an AMA on Reddit to introduce K2 Horizon, a connected fleet of six fully open AI models ranging from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters. Alongside the model weights, the team released full training data recipes, code, intermediate checkpoints, and fine-grained evaluation logs. Unlike many releases that only provide final model weights, K2 Horizon offers end-to-end transparency across the entire model creation pipeline. This enables independent researchers to reproduce, audit, and build upon frontier-class AI methodologies across a broad range of hardware targets. The model suite incorporates specialized architectural components such as MoVA and sparse attention to optimize efficiency and context handling across scale sizes. During the live event, the IFM team took technical questions on pre-training data mixes, post-training alignment, on-device deployment, and upcoming model updates.
## BACKGROUND
Many open AI models are only 'open-weights,' meaning the public gets the trained output but cannot inspect the exact data mixtures or training code used to build it. Releasing intermediate checkpoints and dataset recipes allows researchers to study how models learn over time and understand the impact of specific data curation strategies.