Ethically trained AI startup Pleias releases new small reasoning models optimized for RAG with built-in citations - Carl Franzen, Venture Beat

French AI startup Pleias made waves late last year with the launch of its ethically trained Pleias 1.0 family of small language models — among the first and only to date to be built entirely on scraping “open” data, that is, data explicitly labeled as public domain, open source, or unlicensed and not copyrighted. Now the company has announced the release of two open source small-scale reasoning models designed specifically for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), citation synthesis, and structured multilingual output. The launch includes two core models — Pleias-RAG-350M and Pleias-RAG-1B — each also available in CPU-optimized GGUF format, making a total of four deployment-ready variants. They are all based on Pleias 1.0, and can be used independently or in conjunction with other LLMs that the organization may already or plan to deploy. All appear to be available under a permissive Apache 2.0 open source license, meaning they are eligible for organizations to take, modify and deploy for commercial use cases.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/ethically-trained-ai-startup-pleias-releases-new-small-reasoning-models-optimized-for-rag-with-built-in-citations/