Side-by-side comparison of LFM2.5-8B-A1B (Liquid AI) and Qwen3-8B (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen) · China) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. LFM2.5-8B-A1B is rated conditional; Qwen3-8B is conditional. They part ways on licence: LFM2.5-8B-A1B is "LFM Open License 1.0", Qwen3-8B is "Apache 2.0".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Per the published LFM Open License v1.0, Liquid AI's terms are Apache-2.0-derived but cap free commercial use at USD 10M annual company revenue — above that threshold deployers must negotiate a paid licence with [email protected]. The model itself is a strong 8.3B / 1.5B-active MoE built for CPU and edge inference, but the 38-trillion-token training corpus is undisclosed and Liquid AI is a US-based MIT spinoff, so EU regulated buyers should run their own DPIA and document the data-transfer story alongside any commercial-tier negotiation. | Conditional Based on published licence terms, Qwen3-8B is released under standard Apache 2.0 with no field-of-use carve-outs, making self-hosted commercial deployment viable. Training-data disclosure is limited to a token count and Chinese origin creates EU AI Act Art. 53 transparency and data-transfer risks that deployers should document. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-05-30 | 2026-04-17 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | LFM Open License 1.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Free under $10M revenue | Unrestricted |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Token count only |
| Origin | USA (Boston) | China (Hangzhou) |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | — | 11/100 |
| Speed | — | 86 tok/s |
| Blended price | — | $0.31/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.