Ai2 open-sources AstaBrief 8B for fast scientific report generation

The Allen Institute for AI said on October 2, 2026 that it is open-sourcing AstaBrief 8B, a model that turns a research question and retrieved literature excerpts into a cited report. Built on Qwen3-8B under Apache 2.0, it runs as Fast mode in the Asta platform, averaging 51.1 seconds per report versus 178.5 seconds for the Claude-powered Thinking mode.

• AstaBrief 8B is based on Qwen3-8B and licensed under Apache 2.0
• Fast mode averages 51.1 seconds per report vs 178.5 seconds for Thinking
• Trained with SFT on 47K examples and DPO on ~6K pairs on 8xH100 GPUs
• Scores 87 on ScholarQA-CS2 versus 77.3 for base Qwen3-8B