Tülu by AllenAI
Ai2's open playbook for turning base LLMs into instruct models
Overview
Tülu is Ai2's family of openly post-trained language models, built on Llama 3.1 and OLMo 2 bases and released with the full training data, recipes and eval framework used to make them — for researchers, not chatbot users.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 3 Sep 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete.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
What you can produce with Tülu by AllenAI
- Full SFT, DPO and RLVR training recipe published
- 8B, 70B and 405B parameter checkpoints
- Both Llama 3.1 and OLMo 2 base variants
- Open-instruct training codebase and eval suite on GitHub
- Training data and preference datasets released publicly
- OLMo 2 variant available under Apache 2.0
Tülu is less a product than a paper trail: Ai2 publishes the SFT data, DPO preference pairs and the RLVR reinforcement method behind each release, so anyone can trace exactly how a base Llama 3.1 or OLMo 2 model became an instruction-follower. The 405B version, which followed the original Tülu 3 release, beat DeepSeek V3 on several benchmarks and traded blows with GPT-4o-mini — a real result for a fully open recipe. Since then Ai2 has folded the Tülu post-training methods into OLMo 3 (November 2025) rather than shipping a standalone Tülu 4, so this is best read as a milestone whose ideas live on elsewhere, not an actively iterating product line. There's no chat app or hosted API — you bring your own GPUs or a third-party host. Good for post-training researchers and ML engineers; not for anyone wanting a finished assistant.
What people say
Tülu 3's headline claim held up under scrutiny: the 70B checkpoint beat the instruct versions of Llama 3.1, Qwen 2.5 and Mistral at comparable sizes, and the 405B variant landed competitively against GPT-4o-mini and Claude 3.5 Haiku while beating DeepSeek V3 on a chunk of Ai2's eval suite. VentureBeat and other outlets covered it as proof that open post-training recipes could close the gap with closed labs' fine-tuning — not just match base-model benchmarks, which open models had already done, but match the harder-to-replicate alignment step.
The reaction on Hacker News was more measured than the press coverage. Commenters on the 405B thread noted that Ai2's contribution was the recipe, not the scale — nobody at Ai2 threw DeepSeek-level compute at it, and the interesting part is that a documented, reproducible SFT+DPO+RLVR pipeline got this far without it. That's the recurring theme in how researchers talk about Tülu: less "best model," more "best paper trail." The training data, preference pairs and the open-instruct codebase are all public, and Ai2's own eval harness ships alongside it, so results are unusually easy to reproduce compared with most frontier post-training work.
The practical complaint is that Tülu was never meant to be used the way a product is used. There's no Ai2-hosted inference endpoint or chat UI; you pull weights from Hugging Face and run them yourself, and the 405B checkpoint needs serious multi-GPU infrastructure that puts it out of reach for anyone without a lab-scale budget. The Llama 3.1-based checkpoints also inherit Meta's Llama Community License restrictions, while the OLMo 2 variant is the fully permissive Apache 2.0 option — a distinction that trips people up if they assume "open" means one license across the board.
Most recently, Ai2 has moved on: OLMo 3 (announced November 2025) absorbed the Tülu post-training approach rather than getting a Tülu 4 label, which means this entry documents a finished, citable milestone rather than a model line still shipping new checkpoints.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Tülu by AllenAI's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Tülu by AllenAI unless explicitly stated.
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