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savoji 
posted an update 7 days ago
Post
4,855
LFM3-1.7B from @LiquidAI is the #1 trending model on the Hub (855 likes). It takes about 1 GB at 4-bit, and in the vendor's own table it beats Qwen3.5 9B on several agent benchmarks.

The edge decision moves from "are small models good enough?" to "which architecture and runtime do I pick?" One 1.7B backbone now ships as text, VL-2B and Omni-2B checkpoints with open weights.

🔍 Architecture and speed
• 24 layers: 13 gated convolutions (kernel 7), 5 sliding-window attention (256 tokens), 6 global attention, chosen by a search over 14 device and backend targets
• llama.cpp Q4_0 at 32K context: 1.8 to 2.8x faster decode than the next model on 3 devices
• Full 128K context needs 1.6 GB of KV cache vs 4.3 GB (Qwen3.5-4B) and 5.6 GB (MiniCPM5-2B)

📊 Liquid AI's table
• Average 49.37 vs 47.24 for Qwen3.5 9B; BFCL V4 71.39 vs 62.83; WebArena-Verified 38.42 vs 28.94
• Qwen3.5 9B still wins SWE-bench Verified (51.20 vs 43.40) and GPQA Diamond (80.40 vs 63.37)

🛠️ Try it
• GGUF (174,177 downloads last month) runs in llama.cpp b11960+, Ollama and LM Studio; MLX 4-bit for Apple Silicon; SGLang for GPUs
• llama-cli -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --temp 0.1 --top-k 50 --repeat-penalty 1.1
• Omni-2B runs in the browser in the WebGPU Space

⚠️ Caveats
• The numbers are vendor-reported, with no independent reproduction in the sources. The card says it is not for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning.

LiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B
LiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B-GGUF
LiquidAI/LFM3-Omni-2B
LiquidAI/LFM3-Omni-2B-WebGPU

Has a sub-2B model held up on your own tool-calling harness?

• Medium: https://medium.com/p/05507e4e81c8
• Substack: https://sajjadpakdamansavoji.substack.com/p/liquid-ais-lfm3-turns-the-small-model
• X: https://x.com/saavoji/status/2117307514177941672
• Website: https://sajjadpsavoji.github.io/blog#liquid-ais-lfm3

Great writeup! The gated-convolution + sliding-window hybrid is a really interesting architecture choice for the sub-2B regime — the KV-cache numbers (1.6 GB at 128K vs 4.3 GB for Qwen3.5-4B) are the kind of practical win that matters for edge deployment.

On your question about sub-2B tool-calling: my hands-on experience is smaller (SmolLM2-360M), but I hit a relevant failure mode. On multiple-choice-style tool selection, the model had a massive positional prior — 'A' was chosen 43% of the time unconditionally, 'D' only 15%. Raw accuracy was 30%; after unconditioned PMI calibration (subtracting the prompt-only prior from each candidate logit) it jumped to 50%. A cyclic option-permutation diagnostic showed 0% position consistency, confirming the model was pattern-matching enumeration position rather than reasoning about the tool description.

I suspect any sub-2B model (including LFM3 at 1.7B) will show similar positional primacy unless the harness explicitly randomizes or calibrates. Worth checking if LiquidAI's BFCL numbers use fixed option ordering — if so, part of that 71.39 might be position luck rather than genuine tool selection.

The repetition/sampling side is also rough at this scale. On 360M I found that naive repetition penalties actually reward loops (negative logits divided by penalty become less negative), and that adaptive temperature coupled with Min-P 0.05 was the only combo that broke loops without leaking garbage tokens. Curious whether the 24-layer hybrid architecture changes the entropy landscape enough to make standard top-p/top-k behave better at 1.7B.

Congrats on getting it trending — the 1 GB at 4-bit + llama.cpp support makes it genuinely deployable. 🤗

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Thanks, the PMI result is a good check. The model card and release post don't say how the BFCL run orders its tools, so I can't rule out position effects. LFM3 writes tool calls as XML function calls rather than picking a letter, which may help, but nothing I have tests that. The card gives no Min-P guidance, only top-k and a repetition penalty.

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The thing is recently i used their model through their platform using OpenCode and when i asked it a very simple thing like, "upgrade this package from 1.9 to 1.15" it said it was okay because 1.9 > 1.15, like we were doing normal math. Anyway that is something i came by and it bothered me because they claim very good coding benchmarks.

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That is a fair hit and it matches the card, which says the model is not recommended for agentic coding. Even in Liquid's own table it trails Qwen3.5 9B on SWE-bench Verified, 43.40 against 51.20. The strengths they claim are tool calling and structured output, so I would keep coding on a larger model.

I have sady only 8gb vram is use local

Embedding > Qwen3 Embedding
Reranking > Qwen3 Reranker
Code Judge > Themis RM
Micro-Router > Supra Router 51M
JSON-Router > Qwen2.5 Instruct 0.5B
Intake> LFM2 700M
Fast Chat Gemma 4 E2B 2B
Main Local Qwopus 4B VRAM and the rest on RAM

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8 GB is plenty here. At 4-bit LFM3-1.7B takes about 1 GB, so it could fit your Intake or JSON router slot, since the card targets tool calling and structured output. Whether it beats your current picks is untested, the numbers are vendor reported. The card says to keep coding and knowledge-heavy work on a bigger model.