Solar LLM
Upstage's Solar LLMs — Korea's frontier family, now Solar Pro 3
Overview
Upstage's Solar family runs from the Apache-2.0 Solar 10.7B (2023) to Solar Pro 3 (January 2026), a 128K-context MoE served via API at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens. It offers the strongest Korean-language performance of any commercial model family.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
Use cases
ASEAN Perspective
Solar LLM in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
Solar is the rare 2023 open-weights story that grew into a real product line. The Apache-2.0 Solar 10.7B and its depth up-scaling trick topped the Hugging Face leaderboard in December 2023; the commercial line then kept shipping — Solar Pro 2 (31B, July 2025) scored above GPT-4.1 on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index, the first Korean-built model rated frontier-class, and Solar Pro 3 (January 2026) is a 128K-context mixture-of-experts model at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens with a free window until March 2026. Korean-language performance is the standout, and Upstage's document-AI products give it real APAC enterprise traction. Caveats: a smaller ecosystem than the US majors, and the old 10.7B open weights are far behind current open models — the API line is where the capability lives.
What people say
Fifteen cents per million input tokens, 60 for output — that's Solar Pro 3 pricing at its January 2026 launch, and Upstage is giving it away free until March 2 to pull developers in. That's the current state of a line most directories still describe as 'the 10.7B model that topped the Hugging Face leaderboard in December 2023.' Both things are true; only one matters now.
The 2023 story earned its keep. Depth up-scaling — splicing extra transformer layers into a pretrained base and continuing training — put Solar 10.7B briefly ahead of Mistral 7B and Llama 2 13B, and those Apache-2.0 weights are still on Hugging Face. But Upstage kept shipping: Solar Pro (22B, late 2024), then Solar Pro 2 (31B, July 2025), which Artificial Analysis scored at 58 on its Intelligence Index — above GPT-4.1, and the first Korean-built model it rated frontier-class. Solar Pro 3 (January 2026) moved to a mixture-of-experts design with a 128K context window and selectable chat and reasoning modes.
The pitch that holds up under scrutiny is Korean. On Ko-MMLU, Hae-Rae and Arena-Hard-style benchmarks the Pro models match or beat the US giants, and Upstage pairs the LLM with a document-parse/OCR product line that does real enterprise business in Korea and Japan. For Southeast Asian teams the case is thinner — this is a Korea-first, APAC-second stack — but as a cost-efficient GPT-4-class API from outside the US-China duopoly, it's worth benchmarking. Self-hosting the old 10.7B in 2026 is nostalgia; the capability lives in the API line.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
Notable facts
- Solar 10.7B was trained by a South Korean company and outperformed all European and American models of similar size, demonstrating APAC's growing contributions to frontier AI.
- The Depth Upscaling technique used for Solar allows models to be built more efficiently by combining and extending existing pre-trained architectures.
- Solar was the first non-Western model to achieve #1 on the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Solar LLM's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Solar LLM unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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