Cohere Command-light

Command-light was Cohere's answer to a question every model vendor eventually faces: what do you sell to the customer who needs an answer in half a second and does not need the best one. It began life as command-medium, the smaller of the two sizes introduced when Cohere moved its Command line to weekly-retrained nightly builds in January 2023, and took the name command-light when the company standardised its model names later that year. Cohere's own description was blunt - a smaller, faster version of command, almost as capable but a lot faster. The specifications were otherwise identical to the flagship of that generation: a 4,000-token context window, a 4,000-token output limit, text in and text out, no tool calling, no citations, no image input. Neither model's parameter count was ever published, so the size gap between them is documented only by the price: 30 cents per million input tokens and 60 cents per million output, against one dollar and two dollars for command. That pricing logic did not survive the next two generations. Command R7B, released in December 2024 as the small model of the Command R family, costs under four cents per million input tokens - roughly an eighth of Command-light - while carrying a context window thirty-two times larger. Cheapness alone stopped being a reason to keep a model on the price list. Cohere deprecated Command-light on 15 September 2025 along with command, command-r-03-2024 and command-r-plus-04-2024, and retired fine-tuning for it in the same announcement. The company assigns a shutdown date only when it decides to switch a deprecated model off; for Command-light it has not done so, so as of August 2026 existing users retain access to a model no new customer can buy.

▸Videos

No videos yet.

▸Reviews