Disclaimer: I am part of the team that trained Kolibri, opinions are mine.

You're right that especially big models benefit from training on copyrighted material in terms of world knowledge (especially from books). However, in the small model space imho agentic capabilities where the model looks up knowledge on the fly are much more important. That's what we focused on quite a bit during training. Personally, I also don't think stealing stuff is okay.

I hope you're right, but I guess we'll see when we get independent benchmarks. My intuition is that even for small models and models mostly focused on tool calling, you _still_ need all that extra contextual stuff for the magic, but I am further from the coalface than you are.