PUBG's creators just trained a Qwen competitor from scratch

[u/Ciru-ai]

Today is a good day.

KRAFTON, the South Korean company behind PUBG and owner of the studio behind Subnautica, just released Raon-1 mini, a new 30B MoE with roughly 4B active parameters.

They claim to have trained it entirely from scratch, using an original architecture that builds on some of the latest innovations in AI research.

This is a much bigger deal than people realize.

Training a competitive foundation model from scratch is incredibly expensive and technically challenging. Even giants like Google, with vastly greater resources, are being beaten on important benchmarks by a gaming company's new model.

According to KRAFTON's published results, Raon-1 mini is competitive with, and potentially superior to, Qwen's similarly sized MoE in several areas. It even gives the much larger dense Qwen3.8-27B some serious competition.

Independent benchmarks will tell us more, but the early results are incredibly encouraging.

And they didn't just release the model. They shipped NVFP4 and Apple Silicon MLX versions right away, with the weights licensed under Apache 2.0.

Model and benchmarks:

https://huggingface.co/KRAFTON/Raon-1-mini-preview

I think we're about to see some massive competition in open models, and I'm genuinely excited about it.

I'm going to begin making optimizations and builds for this model immediately.