Solar Mini is an advanced pre-trained large language model that matches the performance of GPT-3.5 while providing responses 2.5 times faster, all while maintaining a parameter count of under 30 billion. In December 2023, it secured the top position on the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard by integrating a 32-layer Llama 2 framework, which was initialized with superior Mistral 7B weights, coupled with a novel method known as "depth up-scaling" (DUS) that enhances the model's depth efficiently without the need for intricate modules. Following the DUS implementation, the model undergoes further pretraining to restore and boost its performance, and it also includes instruction tuning in a question-and-answer format, particularly tailored for Korean, which sharpens its responsiveness to user prompts, while alignment tuning ensures its outputs align with human or sophisticated AI preferences. Solar Mini consistently surpasses rivals like Llama 2, Mistral 7B, Ko-Alpaca, and KULLM across a range of benchmarks, demonstrating that a smaller model can still deliver exceptional performance. This showcases the potential of innovative architectural strategies in the development of highly efficient AI models.