Vambo AI releases MORENA, a 1.5B model for 12 African languages

Vambo AI has released MORENA, a 1.5B-parameter language model covering 12 African languages plus English, French and code. It scored 1.408 bpb on a key benchmark, beating 26 tested models including offerings from Google, Meta and Alibaba while being up to 8x smaller.

• MORENA scored 1.408 bpb, the best of 26 models tested
• Closest rival Lugha-Llama-8B scored 1.423 bpb with over 5x the parameters
• Its tokenizer encodes African text 1.39x more compactly than Gemma 3
• Pretraining used 251.7B tokens and over 22,000 A100 GPU hours