Abacus.ai has introduced Dracarys, a new family of open large language models (LLMs) tailored specifically for coding tasks, marking a significant advancement in the generative AI landscape. Named after the command to unleash fire from dragons in the popular HBO series Game of Thrones, Dracarys brings optimized coding capabilities to developers using open-source LLMs.
This initiative is not Abacus.ai’s first venture into dragon-themed AI models. Earlier this year, the company released Smaug-72B, a general-purpose LLM named after the dragon from The Hobbit. Unlike Smaug, Dracarys focuses on coding optimization, leveraging what Abacus.ai calls the “Dracarys recipe” – a combination of optimized fine-tuning and curated training datasets. This technique has shown to enhance the coding performance of models such as Qwen-2 72B and Llama 3.1 70B, as explained by Bindu Reddy, CEO and co-founder of Abacus.ai.
Generative AI for coding is an increasingly active space, with GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, and Replit among the early players bringing AI-enhanced coding tools to developers. Dracarys differentiates itself by offering a fine-tuned version of Meta’s Llama 3.1 model, which competes against other coding-centric LLMs like Anthropic’s closed-source Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Reddy emphasized that Dracarys-72B-Instruct stands out as the top open-source coding model in its class.
Performance benchmarks underscore Dracarys’ capabilities. According to LiveBench, the Dracarys-tuned Llama 3.1 model achieves a coding score of 35.23, up from the 32.67 scored by the base model. Similarly, the Qwen-2 72B model’s score improves from 32.38 to 38.95 when enhanced with the Dracarys recipe. Beyond these initial models, Abacus.ai plans to extend the Dracarys enhancements to other models, including Deepseek-coder and the larger Llama-3.1 400B model.
Developers and enterprises can benefit from Dracarys’ enhanced coding performance, especially those who prefer to keep their data private and avoid public APIs like OpenAI and Gemini. The fine-tuned Dracarys models are available on Hugging Face and as part of Abacus.ai’s Enterprise offering. Reddy also mentioned the potential availability of Dracarys on Abacus.ai’s ChatLLM service, targeting small teams and individual professionals, based on user demand.
