Trinity Mini Open Weight US AI Model Demo & Performance Review

This review provides a hands-on local demonstration and analysis of the Trinity Mini model, an Apache 2 open-weight, open-source model released by Acri AI. Trinity Mini is a 26 billion parameter model with 3 billion active parameters, belonging to a family of sparse mixture of expert (MoE) models trained end-to-end in the US. The architecture is defined as AFM or AF mixture of expert, which builds on the transformer model and focuses on stable and efficient MoE training, incorporating features like grouped query attention and sigmoid routing without auxiliary losses.
The project emphasizes model sovereignty and ownership for developers and enterprises. Acri AI specifically shifted to full US-based pre-training to ensure jurisdictional compliance and data provenance, aiming to provide permissive American-led open-source AI.
The demonstration involved installing and serving the model locally using tools like VLM, Deep CX parser, and Hermes. Performance was tested across several domains:
1. Coding Task: The model was given a complex request to create a self-contained HTML file using p5.js for a rocket simulation. During testing, the model struggled significantly, producing incomplete code and failing (getting stuck or hallucinating) during subsequent attempts to improve the code,,.
2. Language/Creativity: The model successfully answered a simple fact-checking question,, and showed creativity during a philosophical humor test, although the results were noted as having room for improvement compared to other models,.
3. Multilinguality Test: The model was tasked with translating a financial sentence into various languages. The translation attempts revealed significant difficulties, various mistakes, and instances of hallucination in languages such as Urdu and Burmese.
Overall, while the release of the open-source open weights is positive, the demonstration concluded that the model’s quality needs to improve to meet the high standards set by other open-source models available today.