Institute of Foundation Models (IFM)

Overview

A research lab at MBZUAI (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence), self-described as dedicated to the open and independent development of frontier-class foundation models. Stated as launched in May 2025, operating from Abu Dhabi, Silicon Valley and Paris (source).

This page is created on the strength of one release and says only what that release states. Everything below the Overview that a fuller entity page would carry — funding, compute, staffing, prior models, strategic relationships — is absent from anything read here, and is marked as such rather than filled in from inference.

A naming collision belongs on this page. IFM's flagship family is called K2, which is also the name of Moonshot AI's Kimi K2 line. They are unrelated labs on different continents. The K2 Horizon release surfaced to this wiki through r/LocalLLaMA, a venue where Kimi releases are routine, and a reader skimming would attribute it wrongly.

Key People

Not stated in anything read.

Models & Products

• K2 Horizon — released 2026-09-03. Six models, 0.9B to 375B, Apache 2.0, published with weights, code, training data and methodology

Recent Activity

• 2026-09-03: K2 Horizon released — six models, and the training data ships with them. 0.9B, 3.7B, 7B, 32B, 36B-A4B and 375B-A23B, each pretrained on approximately 20 trillion tokens, all under Apache 2.0 covering weights and code. Published alongside: intermediate checkpoints, training configurations, fine-grained logs, evaluation results, and training data where redistribution licences permit — with source descriptions, construction methods and mixture recipes given for restricted datasets. IFM claims top-tier performance in every size class and state of the art at 0.9B, 3.7B and 7B, and publishes no benchmark name and no score for any of it (source)

Strategic Position

Not assessed. Nothing read on the run that created this page speaks to IFM's positioning, funding, compute access or relationships with other labs, and the single release it holds is not enough to infer one. This section says so rather than carrying a marker: the release itself is the only evidence available, and what it shows is a disclosure posture — data and code alongside weights, no scores — not a market position.

The one observation the release supports: on the axis Open-Weights Policy Fight tracks, IFM publishes strictly more than any lab that page currently holds. Whether that is a strategy or a consequence of being university-attached is not stated anywhere read.

Related

• K2 Horizon
• Open-Weights Policy Fight
• Hugging Face — the distribution channel for the release
• Moonshot AI — unrelated, and the reason the naming note above exists