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Posted by xenova 5 hours ago

Bonsai 27B: A 27B-Class model that runs on a phone(prismml.com)
265 points | 90 commentspage 3
xyzsparetimexyz 4 hours ago|
That's awesome. What's the largest model that could fit onto a single 16gb gpu at 1.125 effects bits per weight?
Catloafdev 3 hours ago||
Doing some naive math, the F16 filesize is ~53.8gb, the 1-bit version is ~3.8gb, about 7% of the original size. The F16 size is roughly 2x param count, so that gives a rough ballpark of ~110B.
kroaton 1 hour ago||
Which would be very interesting to test, as larger models (such as Deepseek V4 Flash or Qwen 397B) seem to compress better. Their Q2 quants are usable as is, even without the ternary compression.
drob518 2 hours ago||
Yep, that’s the question. I asked just that when Bonsai’s first models got released. Super interesting if we can push the parameter count over 100B with 1.125 bit quantization and still keep pretty good performance versus 16-bit 100B models. That’s a definite sweet spot.
erelong 4 hours ago||
I was trying Ornith 9B locally (it's up on Ollama) which claims:

> Ornith-1.0-9B, which can be easily deployed on edge devices, matches or exceeds the performance of much larger models such as Gemma 4-31B and Qwen 3.6 35B.

https://deep-reinforce.com/ornith_1_0.html

Only tried it so much so far; it did a little better than Qwen 9B

liuliu 4 hours ago||
Note that 3.5 9B cannot do thinking (while 3.6 27B can, pretty effectively, quite verbosely).
gunalx 2 hours ago||
3.5 9B can do thinking. Its just disabled by default in its gguf chat template.
liuliu 2 hours ago||
It is disabled because it doesn't work :) Try it and see the doom loop it gets itself in.
janalsncm 3 hours ago|||
Is that a 1-bit LLM? I don’t understand the connection with this article.
erelong 3 hours ago||
Oh, I don't actually know the difference if you want to explain it

The title says it's 27B grade running on a phone and what I was comparing it to in my mind was a model that runs at 35B grade that could presumably run on a phone "better"?

edit: I asked AI for the difference and understand a little better, thanks for the heads up to learn the difference between models... I think the thing was, although ornith was created for a specific agentic purpose, it was still outperforming a previous generalist model I had running locally (so in my mind I thought it was still a better local model) - I'd like to try bonsai out if I can figure out how to run it lol

verdverm 2 hours ago||
Orinth was not impressive in my vibes testing, I just completed my first grid analysis with real evals on qwen 27b. I can now scale that grid analysis and intend to include the qwen 9b ftunes I've seen going around. They were actually a main motivation because so many claim this or that one is better, but very little in the way of evals
drob518 2 hours ago||
I tried it, too, and it got stuck in some loops where it couldn’t recover. Shame, it was promising for the same reason as Bonsai’s models.
verdverm 1 hour ago||
check out geyron-9b, I've only used it a bit, but seems better than orinth on vibe evals

huggingface.co/Tivaphraen/Geryon-9B-v1

drob518 1 hour ago||
Interesting, thanks. Looking at the model card on Huggingface, it’s combining the Qwythos and Qwable fine tunes from Empero.
verdverm 1 hour ago||
yea, it's an experiment in merging multiple fine-tuned models
0xbadcafebee 2 hours ago||
27B is way more than you need for a phone. Doesn't matter how much you try to compress it, it's the wrong application of the wrong tool. There are already useful tiny models that fit on phones and do basic things really well. Dumb down a big model too much and it becomes worse than a small fine-tuned model.
wy35 2 hours ago||
Entire blog post seems to be AI-generated :/
wmf 2 hours ago|
Do you think people who work on AI for a living are not going to use it?
wy35 2 hours ago||
Of course not, personally almost all of my code these days is generated.

The LLM style of writing is just very distracting to read. “It unlocks X”, “Y changes the equation”, and why is there always something shifting? Makes my eyes glaze over in an otherwise interesting post.

arjie 2 hours ago||
The text is mostly content-free. Headline + charts are enough for most HN stories.
pdfops 3 hours ago||
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ai_fry_ur_brain 4 hours ago||
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Havoc 4 hours ago||
This must be some sort of unpublished app?

I can just see their image tool on the app store

smallerize 1 hour ago||
One of the links on the sidebar goes to "Locally AI" https://apps.apple.com/us/app/locally-ai-by-lm-studio/id6741... it requires an iPhone 17 Pro or Pro Max to run the 27B model though.
Catloafdev 3 hours ago||
It's a LLM model, not a phone app.

Available on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/collections/prism-ml/bonsai-27b

Havoc 1 hour ago||
Indeed.

The article is about running it on a phone though, and shows an app with their branding running this in text mode on a phone. I'm asking where can I find this app to try what is being demonstrated in this article & video? Appstore only has an image gen app by them and other MLX apps I've tried don't seem to support this model

theLiminator 2 hours ago|
This is useful research, but this particular model itself is likely absolutely useless.
oceansweep 2 hours ago||
Why make this comment without having tried it first? It very clearly is not useless and performs a lot better than one might expect. I am currently waiting to do more benchmarks of it in comparison to the full weight model, but it seems promising/better than Mistral Nemo at a lower file size.
Onavo 2 hours ago||
I think what OP means is that the "minimum viable product" for a daily use LLM is probably somewhere around e.g. GPT 4o's level of intelligence (YMMV). Below a certain threshold, you are better off using specialized machine learning models rather than general purpose LLMs. It's very difficult to get that level of intelligence fully local on a mobile device without streaming to the cloud.
mchusma 1 hour ago||
I do think this would be interesting if they made these easy to finetune, as I do think this level of intelligence is likely sufficient for many applications and could be extremely cheap to run.
drob518 1 hour ago||
Evidence?