Kanana-Nano-2.1B

Kanana-Nano-2.1B is the nano tier of Kakao's Kanana bilingual language model series, released open source in February 2025 alongside a technical report. It targets Korean and English with competitive performance for its size class, using compute-efficient techniques including staged pre-training, depth up-scaling, and distillation.

The model ships in base, instruct, embedding, function-call, and RAG variants to support research on Korean language models. Kakao notes that neither pre-training nor post-training data includes Kakao user data.

The Kanana series spans 2.1B to 32.5B parameters; the 2.1B nano models are the only fully open tier, while larger Flag and Essence tiers remain internal. It is a practical pick for Korean-language experimentation on modest hardware.