Deep Cogito has released several open large language models (LLMs) that outperform competitors and claim to represent a step towards achieving general superintelligence.
The San Francisco-based company, which states its mission is “building general superintelligence,” has launched preview versions of LLMs in 3B, 8B, 14B, 32B, and 70B parameter sizes. Deep Cogito asserts that “each model outperforms the best available open models of the same size, including counterparts from LLAMA, DeepSeek, and Qwen, across most standard benchmarks”.
Impressively, the 70B model from Deep Cogito even surpasses the performance of the recently released Llama 4 109B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model.
Iterated Distillation and Amplification (IDA)
Central to this release is a novel training methodology called Iterated Distillation and Amplification (IDA).
Deep Cogito describes IDA as “a scalable and efficient alignment strategy for general superintelligence using iterative self-improvement”. This technique aims to overcome the inherent limitations of current LLM training paradigms, where model intelligence is often capped by the capabilities of larger “overseer” models or human curators.
The IDA process involves two key steps iterated repeatedly:
- Amplification: Using more computation to enable the model to derive better solutions or capabilities, akin to advanced reasoning techniques.
- Distillation: Internalising these amplified capabilities back into the model’s parameters.
Deep Cogito says this creates a “positive feedback loop” where model intelligence scales more directly with computational resources and the efficiency of the IDA process, rather than being strictly bounded by overseer intelligence.
“When we study superintelligent systems,” the research notes, referencing successes like AlphaGo, “we find two key ingredients enabled this breakthrough: Advanced Reasoning and Iterative Self-Improvement”. IDA is presented as a way to integrate both into LLM training.
Deep Cogito claims IDA is efficient, stating the new models were developed by a small team in approximately 75 days. They also highlight IDA’s potential scalability compared to methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or standard distillation from larger models.
As evidence, the company points to their 70B model outperforming Llama 3.3 70B (distilled from a 405B model) and Llama 4 Scout 109B (distilled from a 2T parameter model).
Capabilities and performance of Deep Cogito models
The newly released Cogito models – based on Llama and Qwen checkpoints – are optimised for coding, function calling, and agentic use cases.
A key feature is their dual functionality: “Each model can answer directly (standard LLM), or self-reflect before answering (like reasoning models),” similar to capabilities seen in models like Claude 3.5. However, Deep Cogito notes they “have not optimised for very long reasoning chains,” citing user preference for faster answers and the efficiency of distilling shorter chains.
Extensive benchmark results are provided, comparing Cogito models against size-equivalent state-of-the-art open models in both direct (standard) and reasoning modes.
Across various benchmarks (MMLU, MMLU-Pro, ARC, GSM8K, MATH, etc.) and model sizes (3B, 8B, 14B, 32B, 70B,) the Cogito models generally show significant performance gains over counterparts like Llama 3.1/3.2/3.3 and Qwen 2.5, particularly in reasoning mode.
For instance, the Cogito 70B model achieves 91.73% on MMLU in standard mode (+6.40% vs Llama 3.3 70B) and 91.00% in thinking mode (+4.40% vs Deepseek R1 Distill 70B). Livebench scores also show improvements.
Here are benchmarks of 14B models for a medium-sized comparison:
While acknowledging benchmarks don’t fully capture real-world utility, Deep Cogito expresses confidence in practical performance.
This release is labelled a preview, with Deep Cogito stating they are “still in the early stages of this scaling curve”. They plan to release improved checkpoints for the current sizes and introduce larger MoE models (109B, 400B, 671B) “in the coming weeks / months”. All future models will also be open-source.
(Photo by Pietro Mattia)
See also: Alibaba Cloud targets global AI growth with new models and tools
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