Aquila
BAAI's first open bilingual (Chinese/English) foundation model
Aquila is the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence’s first open bilingual language model, released in 2023 as a 7-billion-parameter base model trained on Chinese and English text. BAAI built it on a GPT-style architecture with a custom tokenizer designed to handle Chinese text more efficiently than tokenizers borrowed from English-first models, and it supports a 2,048-token context window. The release included both a base pretrained model and an AquilaChat instruction-tuned variant, along with a code-focused AquilaCode model.
BAAI released the weights openly under its own Aquila license, which permits commercial use with some conditions, and made the models available through Hugging Face and its own ModelHub. Aquila was part of a wave of Chinese open-weight models released in 2023 aimed at giving domestic developers alternatives to Western models like LLaMA, and it has since been superseded within BAAI’s own lineup by the larger, longer-context Aquila2 family.