Cohere's North Small Translate: open 218B MoE beats DeepL on WMT26
Free to try on Cohere's API, three checkpoints on Hugging Face, ~58x cheaper than Gemini per task — but the CC BY-NC license blocks commercial use.
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218B MoE, 25B active — translation only
North Small Translate is a sparse mixture-of-experts (128 experts, 8 active) that fires ~25B of its 218B weights per token, with 16K in / 16K out context across 50 languages. It's built purely for machine translation, not chat — Cohere pitching translation as dedicated infrastructure again.
It claims the DeepL crown — vendor-reported
On WMT26 Cohere reports 83.6 (84.4 for the agentic variant) against DeepL NextGen's 81.4, Qwen 3.5's 81.6, and Google Translate's 68.2. The catch: these are Cohere's own runs with GPT-5.6-Sol as judge, so treat them as vendor numbers until independent WMT26 results land.
Free on the API, weights on Hugging Face
Call it free on Cohere's Chat V2 API until you hit rate limits, or self-host one of three checkpoints — the NVFP4 quant fits on a single B200 (or 2x H100). Throughput is ~112 tok/s, and Cohere pegs cost at $0.0007 per task vs ~$0.039 for Gemini 3.1 Pro, roughly 58x cheaper.
The catch: CC BY-NC, commercial gated
The weights ship under CC BY-NC 4.0 — non-commercial only. Put it in something you sell and you need a paid Cohere license, an irony critics flagged against Cohere's own 'AI sovereignty' pitch. Fine for research, prototypes, and internal tools; a wall for anything you charge for.
Build this weekend: a long-document translator
Where it pulls away is length — translating two full book chapters in a single call, it scored 48.9 vs Google Translate's 21.3. That makes a private, self-hosted pipeline for manuals, contracts, or docs across 50 languages a realistic weekend build, with no per-character API bill.
Elsewhere: clean up your agent's messy commits
Simon Willison shipped commit-rewriter 0.1, a small Python web app that rewrites the sloppy commit messages coding agents leave behind before you push. pip install commit-rewriter, point it at a repo, edit them in the browser.