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title: README
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# Refract AI Labs

**Refract AI Labs** is an experimental AI research group focused on efficient language-model architectures, compact reasoning systems, and unconventional alternatives to standard dense Transformers.

We build small models, weird architectures, and research prototypes with one main goal:

> **Maximum capability, minimum parameters.**
## News
**28 September 2026** Refract AI is now a seperate group from smilyai!

**29 September 2026** We have collected over 50B tokens in preperation for the Orion-T2.1 Pretraining run.

## Current projects

### Orion / Project Prism

**Orion** is our experimental language-model family exploring:
- explicit temporary working state
- recurrent computation
- parameter reuse
- sparse conditional computation
- compact knowledge and procedure mechanisms
- hybrid base + instruction training

The current public model is:

**Orion Flagship Mini**  
A ~219M parameter custom-architecture causal language model and instruction-tuned assistant.

Model:
https://huggingface.co/Refract-Labs/Orion-Flagship-Mini

Base model:
https://huggingface.co/Refract-Labs/Orion-Flagship-Mini-Base

## Research direction

We are especially interested in:
- efficient LLM architectures
- recurrent and iterative reasoning
- alternatives to scaling parameter count
- parameter-efficient computation
- long-context behavior
- model memory and working state
- post-training and hybrid training methods
- small-model capability research

## Philosophy

We like experiments that are:
- measurable
- reproducible
- honest about limitations
- interesting even when they fail

Architecture claims should be tested with controlled comparisons rather than assumed from design alone.

## Open research

Some Refract AI Labs models and code are released publicly for research, experimentation, and community feedback.

Expect prototypes, unfinished ideas, occasional cursed training runs, and hopefully a few genuinely useful discoveries. 🧪

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Part of the wider **SmilyAI** research ecosystem. (still kinda)