Today we're releasing flash-1-mini — the first model in our open-weight, bilingual Canadian-context family. You can download it, run it on a laptop, and keep it. No API key, no account, nothing anyone can revoke.
It's a 4-billion-parameter, vision-capable model, released under the Apache 2.0 license and fine-tuned for one job in particular: getting Canadian legal citations right.
A specialist, not a generalist
Most models are graded on how much they know. flash-1-mini is graded on something narrower and more useful to a legal or compliance team: whether you can trust what it writes. That comes down to two things — getting the citation right, and following the instruction exactly.
We fine-tuned it from an open, Apache-2.0-licensed Qwen base on a bilingual corpus of Canadian law, then measured it against that exact base under identical conditions, with the same scorer. It stays a capable general model — but this is what it's built for.
How it measures up
Against the base model it's fine-tuned from, under identical conditions:
| Capability | Base | flash-1-mini | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Legal citation integrity (CBLRE) | 15.8% | 42.1% | +26.3 (2.7×) |
| Instruction-following (IFEval) | 30.3% | 53.2% | +22.9 |
| Complex reasoning (BBH) | 68.6% | 79.0% | +10.4 |
| General knowledge (MMLU) | 69.8% | 69.8% | preserved |
Verified · reproducible from the public methodology
A specialist trades what it isn't built for. flash-1-mini gives up ground on retrieval (Canadian RAG, −5.0) and tool use (function-calling, −9.1). We publish those regressions next to the gains — the full table, every number, lives on the model page.
Open from day one
The model weights are available today on Hugging Face. Alongside them, we're releasing four open public goods — the Canadian Bilingual Legal Corpus, the CBLRE evaluation suite, and two methodology standards — rolling out over the days that follow.
The point is reproducibility: every number we publish can be re-run from the public methodology and evaluation suite. The standard is open, so any builder, evaluator, or procurement officer can hold us — and any other model — to it.
Yours to keep
flash-1-mini runs on consumer hardware, from Apple Silicon laptops to Raspberry Pi-class devices, fully offline. Once it's downloaded, it's a file on your machine. If SimpleDirect disappeared tomorrow, it would still work.
That's the whole idea: AI you can own.
SimpleDirect®, operating as Alpine Pacific Trading Inc., is a Toronto-based team building open-weight, bilingual Canadian-context AI models you can download, run, and own.