StableLM
Stability AI's dormant open LLM family — no new models since 2024
Overview
StableLM is Stability AI's now-dormant language model family, spanning the 2023 Alpha releases through Stable LM 2 (1.6B–12B). Free under the Stability AI Community License for smaller users, the line has had no new models since April 2024 as the company refocused on image, video and audio.
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 These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete.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
StableLM 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).
StableLM gave Stability AI a foothold in open language models, and Stable LM 2 1.6B was genuinely competitive at its size in early 2024. But the line is finished: nothing has shipped since the 12B in April 2024, the models are effectively deprecated, and Stability refocused on image, video and audio after its 2024 financial rescue. The weights remain downloadable, so hobbyists can still run them, and the 1.6B stays a reasonable teaching model for edge experiments. For anything new, though, Qwen, Llama, Gemma and Phi small models outperform it with active support behind them. Note the licence too — Stable LM 2 uses the Stability AI Community License, free below US$1M revenue, not Apache 2.0. Treat StableLM as a closed chapter, not a current option.
What people say
Stability AI walked away from language models, and StableLM is what it left behind. The April 2023 Alpha launch (3B and 7B) landed with a thud — early testers found the models rambling and weak against contemporaries — but the follow-ups were better: StableLM-3B-4E1T later that year, Stable LM Zephyr 3B, then Stable LM 2 1.6B in January 2024, a genuinely strong small model trained on 2 trillion tokens with multilingual data mixed in. A 12B arrived that April. And then nothing.
The silence tracks the company's 2024 near-collapse: CEO Emad Mostaque resigned in March, and the rescue investment that followed refocused Stability on what actually pays its bills — image, video and audio generation. The language models were never picked back up. Third-party trackers now describe the StableLM line as deprecated and not recommended for production, and the GitHub repo has been quiet for years.
Two practical notes if you're tempted anyway. First, the licence isn't the free-for-all people assume: Stable LM 2 ships under the Stability AI Community License — free for individuals and companies under US$1M revenue, paid enterprise terms above that — not Apache 2.0. Second, the small-model niche Stable LM 2 1.6B once led is now crowded with actively maintained alternatives: Qwen's small models, Gemma, Phi and Llama 3.2 all outperform it and still get updates.
The weights stay downloadable, and the 1.6B remains a decent classroom example of what careful data curation buys at tiny scale. As anything more than that, this is a museum piece.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
Notable facts
- StableLM 2 1.6B is one of the most capable models at its parameter scale, outperforming models twice its size on some benchmarks.
- Stability AI trained StableLM on over 1 trillion tokens from public and proprietary sources, larger than the original LLaMA training set.
- The name StableLM continues Stability AI's naming convention of 'Stable [modality]' — Stable Diffusion for images, StableAudio for audio, StableVideo for video.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including StableLM's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with StableLM 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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