Aquila2 is the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence’s second-generation bilingual model family, released in October 2023 as a follow-up to the original Aquila. The family spans 7B and 34B base models, chat-tuned AquilaChat2 variants, and long-context versions extended to 16,000 tokens through positional-encoding interpolation, plus experimental 70B checkpoints. BAAI reported that Aquila2-34B outperformed other open Chinese-English models of similar size on Chinese-language benchmarks at the time of release.
The models are released under the Apache 2.0 license for the codebase, with model weights governed by BAAI’s own Aquila license agreement that allows commercial use under certain conditions. Aquila2 targeted developers who needed strong bilingual performance without relying on a Western base model like LLaMA, and it remained one of BAAI’s main open releases until the organization shifted more attention toward its FlagEmbedding and other specialized model lines.