license: apache-2.0
language:
- sr
- hr
- bs
- mk
- sl
- sq
- cnr
- bg
- el
- tr
- ro
- hu
base_model: Qwen/Qwen3-8B
library_name: transformers
tags:
- balkan
- southeast-europe
- multilingual
- honest-ai
- sovasoft
🌐 EN · SR · HR · BS · MK · SL · SQ · CNR · BG · EL · TR · RO · HU
Zora v1.11 — an open, honest LLM for the Balkans & Southeast Europe
зора = „dawn". One to unite them all. — by Sovasoft (ai.in.rs)
1 · What Zora is
Zora is an open 8B language model (built on Qwen3-8B) for 12 languages of the Balkans and Southeast Europe: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Slovenian, Albanian, Montenegrin, Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish, Romanian, Hungarian.
Zora is not built to be the biggest model — it is built to be honest, in-language, and multi-perspective:
- thinks in the target language instead of pivoting through English,
- shows several perspectives on contested topics instead of one national view,
- and above all: admits when it doesn't know instead of inventing facts.
2 · The development story (v1.0 → v1.1 → v1.11)
| Version | Languages | State |
|---|---|---|
| v1.0 | 6 | first public release |
| v1.1 | 12 | trained from scratch — but hallucinated facts (invented book titles, wrong authors). Never released. |
| v1.11 | 12 | the honest fix: says „I don't know", searches when unsure, in-language reasoning. This release. |
v1.1 taught us the key lesson — a small model can't memorize every fact, so instead of faking it, v1.11 was retrained to be honest (see the benchmark below).
3 · Strengths & limits (honest)
Strengths
- ✅ Honesty: admits uncertainty instead of hallucinating (HALLU 1→10, DETAIL 0→8 vs v1.1)
- ✅ In-language quality: teaching, long-form, instructions — all strong across 12 languages
- ✅ Tool discrimination: answers general knowledge directly, searches only when needed
- ✅ Multi-perspective on contested history/culture
Limits (be aware)
- ⚠️ Multi-step logic/math (LOGIC/ANALYSIS) is weak — an 8B limit; step-by-step
<think>helps and improves in v1.12 - ⚠️ Factual depth is limited (8B) — for exact facts (law, dates, current data) use RAG/web-search, don't rely on memory
- ⚠️ Quantization: use Q5_K_M / Q6_K / Q8_0. Avoid Q4 and below — heavy quantization made the model hallucinate in our tests.
4 · Benchmark (BalkanBench, 13 axes × 12 languages)
🔬 BalkanBench is open — test any model yourself: https://github.com/olivilo/balkanbench Deterministic scoring (script / language / keywords / numbers). v1.11 (16-bit): 84/156.
Zora leads the field — beating models 3–4× its size, including the current Gemma-4-31B and Qwen3.6-30B:
| Model | Size | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Zora v1.11 | 8B | 84 |
| Gemma-4-31B | 31B | 77 |
| Mistral-24B | 24B | 73 |
| Qwen3.6-30B | 30B | 73 |
| Salamandra | 7B | 66 |
| EuroLLM | 9B | 65 |
| Qwen2.5-32B | 32B | 65 |
| Gemma-2-27B | 27B | 63 |
| Aya | 8B | 61 |
| BgGPT | 7B | 56 |
| YugoGPT | 7B | 35 |
Quantization stays strong — Q5/Q6/Q8 all remain usable (avoid Q4):
The honesty fix in numbers, and per-axis strengths:
5 · Usage
Recommended quant: Q5_K_M (balanced) or Q6_K (near-lossless). Ollama: ollama run olivilo/zora # or: ollama run hf.co/sovasoft/zora-v1.11:Q5_K_M.
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("sovasoft/zora-v1.11")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("sovasoft/zora-v1.11", device_map="auto")
📚 Give Zora your own knowledge: see RAG-GUIDE — connect your own documents (zora_rag.py, Ollama+numpy) or live web search. Zora answers only from the sources and admits when it cannot find the answer.
6 · Help Zora grow
Zora's weakest areas are factual depth and some smaller languages. Send us open, licensable sources (texts, corpora, glossaries) in any of the 12 languages → kontakt@ai.in.rs. See the multilingual manifesto WHY-LANGUAGES on why thinking in your own language matters.
7 · Acknowledgements
Zora exists because of open source. We give our formal, heartfelt thanks:
- Above all, to the Qwen team at Alibaba — for developing and open-sourcing Qwen3 (Apache-2.0), the foundation model Zora is built upon. Without their generosity, Zora would not exist.
- To the platforms and structures that made this possible — Kaggle, Google Colab, Modal, HuggingFace, Ollama, Unsloth — for the compute, the tools, and the open infrastructure.
- To the open-source community, for the models, code, and knowledge freely shared with everyone.
- To the people of the Balkans — whose languages, voices, stories and perspectives are Zora's very heart.
- And to all that is.
зора — the dawn belongs to everyone.
Sovasoft · ai.in.rs · one to unite them all