Chroma Context-1

by Chroma (no company note in the vault)

20B retrieval subagent: decomposes a hard query into several search steps, retrieves iteratively and prunes its own context to keep searching.

Base: derived from gpt-oss-20B; 20B parameters, MXFP4 quantisation
Release: 2026-03-26; weights under Apache 2.0, data-generation code also open
Role: a search subagent used alongside a separate answering model, not a general chat model. The earlier wording “rewrites RAG queries” understated it: it runs multi-step retrieval and discards irrelevant documents as it goes.
Claims (vendor): retrieval quality comparable to frontier LLMs at lower cost, up to 10x faster than larger models; results on generated web/finance/legal/email tasks and on BrowseComp-Plus and FRAMES.
“Native ChromaDB integration” from the earlier note: unverified.

Open weights, free to self-host.

Sources