Alpaca vs. Command

Overview

Alpaca is an instruction-finetuned LLM based off of LLaMA.

The first of many instruct-finetuned versions of LLaMA, Alpaca is an instruction-following model introduced by Stanford researchers. Impressively, with only $600 of compute spend, the researchers demonstrated that on qualitative benchmarks Alpaca performed similarly to OpenAI's text-davinci-003, a significantly larger model.

Initial release: 2023-03-13

Reference

https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/03/13/alpaca.html

Further Reading

Overview

Command is Cohere's enterprise model family for agents, retrieval-augmented generation, multilingual work, and private deployment. Command A+ is the current open-weight generation.

Cohere develops enterprise language models with an emphasis on retrieval, citations, multilingual applications, tool use, and data sovereignty. Command A+, released in May 2026, is a 218B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 25B active parameters. It supports text and image input, reasoning, agentic workflows, 48 languages, and private deployment under the Apache 2.0 license.

Initial release: 2021-11-15

Current generation: Command A+

Reference

https://cohere.com/command

Further Reading

• https://cohere.com/blog/command-a-plus