Snowflake releases Arctic model weights under Apache 2.0

Snowflake released base and instruction-tuned Arctic checkpoints, with 480 billion total and 17 billion active parameters. Initial inference implementations included work with NVIDIA and vLLM teams.

Weights and implementations

The release made Arctic Base and Instruct weights available under Apache 2.0. The model card identifies a hybrid mixture-of-experts architecture. Snowflake also credited NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM and vLLM teams with preliminary inference implementations; model weights and access through a hosted endpoint remain distinct surfaces. [1][2][3]

Sources

  1. Snowflake Arctic: The Best LLM for Enterprise AI — Efficiently Intelligent, Truly Open

    Snowflake · Apr 24, 2024

  2. Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-instruct

    Snowflake · retrieved Oct 23, 2026

  3. Snowflake launches Arctic, an LLM focused on transparency

    CIO Dive · Apr 24, 2024