Command vs. FLAN-T5

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

Overview

FLAN-T5 is a finetuned version of Google's popular T5 model with instruct-finetuning. As stated in the model repository's introduction, compared to T5, FLAN-T5 is "just better at everything." With its permissive license, FLAN-T5 has become a popular option for a starting instruct model.

Initial release: 2022-12-06

Reference

https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/model_doc/flan-t5

Further Reading