Meet ZAYA1-8B, a super efficient, open reasoning model trained on AMD Instinct MI300 GPUs
Even as leading AI providers like OpenAI and Anthropic battle over the compute to train and release ever larger, more powerful models, other labs are going in a different direction — pursuing the development of smaller, more efficient models and often open sourcing them. The latest worth paying attention to comes from the lesser-known Palo Alto startup Zyphra, which this week released its new reasoning, mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model, ZAYA1-8B, with just over 8 billion parameters and only 760 million active — far fewer than the trillions estimated for the likes of the big labs. Yet, ZAYA1-8B retains competitive performance on third-party benchmarks against GPT-5-High and DeepSeek-V3.2. It can be downloaded from Hugging Face now free of charge under a permissive, standard, enterprise-friendly Apache 2.0 license — and enterprises and indie developers can begin using and customizing it immediately to suit their needs. Individual users can also test it themselves here free at Zyphra Cloud, the startup’s inference solution. But the real headline is what ZAYA1-8B was trained on: a full stack of AMD Instinct …





