Essential AI

Today, we’re excited to introduce Rnj-1, @essential_ai's first open model; a world-class 8B base + instruct pair, built with scientific rigor, intentional design, and a belief that the advancement and equitable distribution of AI depend on building in the open. We bring American open-source at par with the best in the world.

Blog → essential.ai/research/rnj-1 Model → huggingface.co/EssentialAI/rn… We have more exciting updates coming soon. Stay tuned!

Farbod Tavakkoli from @ATT and @DiamosGreg from @tensorwave demonstrated world-class efficiency at scale, achieving exceptional utilization across 256 @AMD MI325X GPUs on TensorWave using ScalarLM. This is a victory for American open weights models.

Rnj-1 has outperformed other open models in its weight class in the largest open-source AI initiative in telecom to-date🚀

[5/5] Check it out on Hugging Face🤗: Model → huggingface.co/EssentialAI/rn… GGUF → huggingface.co/EssentialAI/rn… Evals → huggingface.co/collections/Es…

[4/5] Our tables have been updated with the Olmo-3-7B-Instruct baseline, and we have added post-processing improvements to our STEM evals, boosting performance. For reproducibility, we release our eval prompts and generations.

[1/5] We thank the community for their feedback on Rnj-1. We’d like to announce a few updates to Rnj-1-instruct based on what we heard: - Resolving premature truncation of generations and improved instruction following. - Instructions for 128k context length extrapolation. - Updated evals, baselines, and model generations for reproducibility. Details follow 🧵

The momentum is real. Let's go! 🚀

We are now the #1 trending text-gen <256B size model on HuggingFace!!

Proud to carry the spirit of Ramanujan with rnj-1: honoring the great minds who showed how curiosity reshapes the world. The lineage of deep thinking is part of our mission. Essential proud.

Check it out openrouter.ai/essentialai/rn…

Rnj-1 is now live on @openrouter!

@essential_ai Try Rnj-1 Instruct now on Together AI together.ai/models/rnj-1-i…

@essential_ai Highlights: 👉 Dominant on SWE-bench, BFCL, and Enamel 👉 Strong tool use and function calling 👉 32K context window 👉 Apache 2.0 licensed, fully open weights 👉 Trained on 8.4T tokens with Muon optimizer

Introducing Rnj-1 Instruct from @essential_ai, an open-source 8B model engineered for agentic coding and STEM tasks. AI natives can now use Rnj-1 Instruct on Together AI and benefit from reliable inference for production-scale software engineering and scientific workflows.

We are beyond thrilled to share our first flagship models, Rnj-1 base and instruct 8B parameter models. Rnj-1 is the culmination of 10 months of hard work by a phenomenal team, dedicated to advancing American SOTA OSS AI. Lots of wins with Rnj-1. 1. SWE bench performance close to GPT 4o. 2. Tool use outperforming all comparable open source models. 3. Mathematical reasoning (AIME’25) nearly at par with GPT OSS MoE 20B. ….