Source: Ollama

Solar: Upstage's Depth-Upscaled Instruction Models

Instruction Document AI 10.7B Open Weights

Solar is an open-weight model family from Upstage, a Korean AI company known for its document understanding products. The flagship Solar 10.7B uses a technique called depth upscaling — essentially merging two Mistral 7B models and continuing training — to produce a 10.7B model that punches well above its weight class. When released, it topped the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard for its size tier. Solar Pro is a larger, higher-capability variant for enterprise deployments.

What Solar Is Good At

• Instruction following and chat — Solar Instruct is notably well-aligned and follows complex instructions reliably
• Document understanding — Upstage's document AI roots show; Solar handles structured and semi-structured document Q&A well
• Reasoning — strong benchmark performance on reasoning tasks for a sub-13B model
• RAG integration — clean instruction following makes it easy to build retrieval pipelines around
• Korean and English — bilingual capability with solid Korean output quality

Who This Model Family is For

Personal Use

Solar is a practical choice if you want a capable local assistant that runs well on modest hardware. The original Solar 10.7B model offers solid reasoning and clean output for everyday writing, summarization, and Q&A. While it remains efficient, it has been surpassed by newer compact models on most benchmarks. For privacy-focused users who value low resource usage, it is still a sensible option for general tasks.

Business / Team Use

Teams that need grounded, on-premise AI for document-heavy workflows — such as internal knowledge search, drafting, and structured summarization — will find Solar useful due to its reputation for staying faithful to provided context. The smaller models keep deployment costs predictable, while the newer Solar Open 100B MoE provides significantly higher capacity for organizations that need more performance without sending data to the cloud. A focused pilot is recommended before standardizing on the larger MoE model.

Developer & Technical Use

Developers building internal tools, RAG pipelines, or applications that require predictable behavior will appreciate Solar's efficiency and groundedness. The 10.7B size is light enough to embed in apps without large GPU budgets. The Solar Open 100B MoE offers more headroom for demanding workloads while maintaining efficient inference thanks to its mixture-of-experts architecture. Plan for the increased memory and serving requirements if moving beyond the compact sizes.

Data Science & Research Use

Solar is interesting for researchers studying model efficiency and architecture trade-offs. Upstage's Depth Up-Scaling approach produced strong results for its size, making the 10.7B model a useful reference point for reproducible experiments on limited hardware. The newer Solar Open 100B MoE provides a valuable data point for studying large open mixture-of-experts behavior, though community tooling and findings are still maturing.

Model Variants at a Glance

NoCloudGPT Deployment Guidance

Small Cloud Server

Solar 10.7B Instruct runs comfortably on a g4dn.xlarge (16GB VRAM). Use Ollama:

ollama run solar:10.7b-instruct-v1-q4_K_M

Local Linux Machine

Q4_K_M GGUF fits easily on a 12GB GPU. For CPU-only machines, the GGUF runs acceptably on 16GB RAM systems via llama.cpp.

On-Premise Server

Solar Pro (22B) runs well on a single A10G (24GB) or two RTX 4090s. Serve with vLLM for multi-user access.

Available Model Sizes

Positioning note: The Solar 10.7B remains a capable and efficient model for many general-purpose tasks. The newer Solar Open 100B MoE offers significantly more capacity for demanding workloads. For maximum performance on current benchmarks, newer families (Llama 3.3, Qwen 2.5, DeepSeek V3) are generally stronger.

Licensing Information

Licensing for Solar models varies by specific release. The widely used Solar 10.7B has historically been available under relatively permissive terms. The newer Solar Open 100B MoE has its own license that should be reviewed directly, as commercial use rights and redistribution conditions can differ between versions.

Because Upstage maintains multiple Solar releases with distinct terms, always confirm the exact license on the official model card for the specific size you intend to deploy.

Official source:

• upstage on Hugging Face

Related Pages

• Mistral 7B (Solar's architectural parent)
• Phi-3 Medium (comparable size, different strengths)
• Compare open models