Reka AI has introduced Reka Flash 3—a reasoning model built from the ground up with 21 billion parameters. Designed for general conversation, coding support, instruction following, and even function calling, this model is crafted to serve as a practical foundation for a wide variety of applications. The training process incorporates a mix of publicly accessible and synthetic datasets, followed by careful instruction tuning and reinforcement learning using REINFORCE Leave One-Out (RLOO) methods. This deliberate approach aims to strike a balance between capability and efficiency, positioning Reka Flash 3 as a sensible choice among its peers.
From a technical standpoint, Reka Flash 3 offers several features that make it both versatile and resource-efficient. One notable aspect is its ability to handle a context length of up to 32k tokens, which facilitates the processing of lengthy documents and complex tasks without undue strain. The model also incorporates a “budget forcing” mechanism through designated <reasoning> tags. This feature enables users to limit the model’s thinking process to a set number of steps, thereby ensuring consistent performance without excessive computational overhead. Moreover, Reka Flash 3 is well-suited for on-device deployments, offering a full precision size of 39GB (fp16) that can be further compressed to 11GB via 4-bit quantization. Such flexibility allows for smoother, local deployments when compared to larger, more resource-intensive models..……
