other
2B parameters
Commercial OK
Reviewed May 2026

Kanarya 2B

Turkish-from-scratch language model trained by Ali Safaya (Koç University researcher). Named after the kanarya (Turkish for 'canary'). Trained on 250+ GB of Turkish text including Wikipedia, news, and books.

License: Apache-2.0·Context: 2,048 tokens

Overview

Turkish-from-scratch language model trained by Ali Safaya (Koç University researcher). Named after the kanarya (Turkish for 'canary'). Trained on 250+ GB of Turkish text including Wikipedia, news, and books.

Strengths

  • Trained from scratch on Turkish — not a fine-tune; tokenizer is purpose-built for Turkish morphology
  • Apache-2.0 license; academic and commercial use both unrestricted
  • Backed by a published paper and reproducible training recipe

Weaknesses

  • Base model without instruction tuning — needs prompting in completion style, not chat
  • 2K context — very short, suitable for short-form generation only
  • Older release; lacks modern post-training (no RLHF/DPO)

Quantization variants

Each quantization trades model quality for file size and VRAM. Q4_K_M is the most popular starting point.

QuantizationFile sizeVRAM required
Q4_K_M1.1 GB2 GB

Get the model

HuggingFace

Original weights

huggingface.co/asafaya/kanarya-2b

Source repository — direct quantization required.

Hardware that runs this

Cards with enough VRAM for at least one quantization of Kanarya 2B.

Compare alternatives

Models worth comparing

Same parameter band, plus what's one tier above and below — so you can decide what actually fits your hardware.

Step up
More capable — bigger memory footprint
Step down
Smaller — faster, runs on weaker hardware
No verdicted models in the next tier down yet.

Frequently asked

What's the minimum VRAM to run Kanarya 2B?

2GB of VRAM is enough to run Kanarya 2B at the Q4_K_M quantization (file size 1.1 GB). Higher-quality quantizations need more.

Can I use Kanarya 2B commercially?

Yes — Kanarya 2B ships under the Apache-2.0, which permits commercial use. Always read the license text before deployment.

What's the context length of Kanarya 2B?

Kanarya 2B supports a context window of 2,048 tokens (about 2K).

Source: huggingface.co/asafaya/kanarya-2b

Reviewed by RunLocalAI Editorial. See our editorial policy for how we research and verify model claims.

Related — keep moving

Before you buy

Verify Kanarya 2B runs on your specific hardware before committing money.