Snowflake has introduced a new open-source large language model named Arctic, which is described as the most open, enterprise-grade model of its kind. Arctic, boasting 480 billion parameters, excels in tasks such as SQL generation and coding. It was developed at a cost of just under $2 million, significantly less than similar models like Llama. The model is fully licensed under Apache 2.0, ensuring open access to its weights, code, and data recipes. Snowflake's Arctic is designed to compete with major players in the AI space such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta, offering a blend of high performance and cost efficiency. Arctic features 17 billion active parameters, 128 experts, and was trained on 3.5 trillion tokens.