Zyphra Releases ZAYA1-8B Reasoning Model Trained on AMD Hardware

Zyphra released ZAYA1-8B on May 7, 2026, a Mixture of Experts reasoning model with 760M active parameters trained entirely on AMD Instinct MI300 hardware. The model uses a novel Markovian RSA test-time compute method and outperforms Claude 4.5 Sonnet on HMMT'25 while closing in on DeepSeek-V3.2 performance. Released under Apache 2.0 license, it sets a new standard for intelligence density in the small language model weight class.

ZAYA1-8B model architecture

• ▪ZAYA1-8B is a reasoning Mixture of Experts model.
• ▪ZAYA1-8B uses a novel Markovian RSA test-time compute method.
• ▪ZAYA1-8B has only 760M active parameters.

Benchmark performance results

• ▪ZAYA1-8B outperforms open-weight models many times its size on math and coding benchmarks.
• ▪ZAYA1-8B surpasses Claude 4.5 Sonnet on HMMT'25.
• ▪ZAYA1-8B is closing in on DeepSeek-V3.2 in performance.
• ▪ZAYA1-8B sets a new standard for intelligence density in the small language model weight class.

Open-source release

• ▪ZAYA1-8B was released under Apache 2.0 license.
• ▪Zyphra released ZAYA1-8B on May 7, 2026.
• ▪ZAYA1-8B was trained end-to-end on AMD Instinct MI300 hardware.

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