Command R 35B v01

Overview

Cohere's original Command R, a 35B optimized for RAG and tool use across 10 languages with 128k context — but locked under CC-BY-NC for non-commercial use only.

When to pick this model

• Research projects exploring early open RAG-native models
• Internal evaluations and prototyping with no commercial intent
• Tool-use experiments needing 128k context
• Multilingual RAG benchmarking across 10 languages
• Comparisons against successor Command R+ 104B

VRAM requirements by quantization

Quantization	VRAM required
Q4_K_M (recommended)	20 GB
Q5_K_M	25 GB
Q8_0	37 GB
FP16 (no quantization)	70 GB

VRAM figures include model weights plus a typical 8k KV cache and ~600 MB runtime overhead (Ollama / llama.cpp baseline). Add headroom for higher context lengths.

Strengths

• First open model designed natively for RAG and tool use
• 128k context for long retrieval pipelines
• 10 evaluated languages, 23 in pretraining
• Strong citation and grounding behavior

Limitations

• CC-BY-NC 4.0 license blocks commercial deployment
• Superseded by Command R+ 104B for production quality
• No multimodal capabilities

Architecture & training

Architecture: Dense 35B · optimized for RAG and tool-use · GQA

Training: 10 languages evaluated, 23 trained.

Quick start

ollama run command-r:35b

Or use the open-source MCP server to query this model from Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client.