Ai2 releases Bwen-8B, a byte-level model retrofitted from Qwen3 8B Base

Ai2 has released Bwen-8B, a byte-level autoregressive language model retrofitted from Qwen3 8B Base through a short additional training procedure called byteification, which lets it operate over bytes instead of tokens. The model is licensed under Apache 2.0 for research and educational use, and requires transformers 4.57.3 or later and the xlstm package.