A Small Model is All You Need. Meet palmer-006 (90M)
After 3 years of experiments, we are finally releasing our flagship tiny model: **palmer-006**.
If you are building for edge hardware, SBCs (Raspberry Pi, etc.), or low-power devices, this is for you. Inspired by Andrej Karpathy's idea of a self-contained "cognitive core," we wanted to see how much power we could pack into a sub-100M parameter footprint.
🧠 **How we "Palmerized" it:** We believe in starting our experiments with the absolute strongest baseline possible. 1. Light fine-tuning on highly curated data 2. Model merging 3. Another light fine-tuning round 4. Adjusted Mamba for maximum token speed ⚡️
⚠️ *Note: This is a foundational language model. It has not been instruction-tuned yet!*
Also, since this needs instruction tuning next to become a chat assistant—**what dataset would you recommend we use for the instruct tune?**
--- 🔗 **Quick Links & Info:**
* **License:** Open for research, education, hobby, and modification! (For commercial use/hosted APIs, shoot an email to nosoyhackercodigo@gmail.com. *PS: Donators can claim a free commercial license!*)
* **Attribution:** Built using AI tech from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII).
Can't wait to see what you build at the edge. Let me know your prompt completions below! 👇
🐆💨 How small can an LLM go and still run on Jetson? We benchmarked + released the whole suite on NVIDIA - LLMs, VLMs, vision, speech, embeddings: embedl/Edge-Inference-Benchmarks
📱 POCKET — a 35-billion-parameter model that runs on your iPhone, and on your PC with no GPU
We're releasing POCKET, VIDRAFT's flagship Darwin-36B-Opus compressed for on-device use. No fork, no CUDA, no cloud — it runs on stock llama.cpp. It's a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model (256 experts, only 8 active per token), so the file can be large while the work per token stays small. That's what lets a 35B model run on a phone, and generate fast on a CPU with no graphics card.
Measured (POCKET-35B IQ1_M vs Bonsai-27B Q1_0): • CPU generate (Xeon, 16 threads): 27.0 vs 10.1 tok/s → 2.69× faster • GPU generate (H100): 197 vs 89 tok/s → 2.22× faster • GPU prompt processing (H100): 753 vs 1816 → 0.41× (Bonsai wins this one — MoE prefill wakes every expert, so sparsity stops helping there. We say so.) • Quality (HellaSwag, 400 q): 61.0% vs 60.0% → a tie (confidence intervals overlap)
On a real consumer laptop — MacBook M3 Pro (18 GB) — POCKET wins every axis, prompt processing included: • Metal generate: 25.4 vs 12.8 → 1.99× • CPU generate: 13.8 vs 4.4 → 3.13× • Metal prompt: 240.7 vs 73.4 → 3.28×
One more quiet fact: the same-size, quality-oriented rival Ternary-Bonsai-27B (7.2 GB) fails to load in upstream llama.cpp at all — it needs the PrismML fork. POCKET runs on the tools you already have: LM Studio, Ollama, PocketPal, MLX.