1 bit with a FP16 scale factor every 128 bits. Fascinating that this works so well.
I tried a few things with it. Got it driving Cursor, which in itself was impressive - it handled some tool usage. Via cursor I had it generate a few web page tests.
On a monte carlo simulation of pi, it got the logic correct but failed to build an interface to start the test. Requesting changes mostly worked, but left over some symbols which caused things to fail. Required a bit of manual editing.
Tried a Simon Wilson pelican as well - very abstract, not recognizable at all as a bird or a bicycle.
There doesn't seem to be a demo link on their webpage, so here's a llama.cpp running on my local desktop if people want to try it out. I'll keep this running for a couple hours past this post: https://unfarmable-overaffirmatively-euclid.ngrok-free.dev
Thanks for sharing the link to your instance. Was blazing fast in responding. Tried throwing a few things at it with the following results:
1. Generating an R script to take a city and country name and finding it's lat/long and mapping it using ggmaps. Generated a pretty decent script (could be more optimal but impressive for the model size) with warnings about using geojson if possible
2. Generate a latex script to display the gaussian integral equation - generated a (I think) non-standard version using probability distribution functions instead of the general version but still give it points for that. Gave explanations of the formula, parameters as well as instructions on how to compile the script using BASH etc
3. Generate a latex script to display the euler identity equation - this one it nailed.
Strongly agree that the knowledge density is impressive for the being a 1-bit model with such a small size and blazing fast response
I reminds me of very early ChatGPT with mostly correct answers but some nonsense. Given its speed, it might be interesting to run it through a 'thinking' phase where it double checks its answers and/or use search grounding which would make it significantly more useful.
I ran my custom agentic SQL debugging benchmark against it and I'm impressed.
Results: 8 passed, 0 failed, 17 errored out of 25
That puts it right between Qwen3.5-4B (7/25) and Nanbeige4.1-3B (9/25) for example, but it took only 200 seconds for the whole test. Qwen3.5 took 976 seconds and Nanbeige over 2000 (although both of these were on my 1070 so not quite the same hardware)
Granite 7B 4bit does the test in 199 seconds but only gets 4/25 correct.
I expect the trend of large machine learning models to go towards bits rather than operating on floats. There's a lot of inefficiency in floats because typically they're something like normally distributed, which makes the storage and computation with weights inefficient when most values are clustered in a small range. The foundation of neural networks may be rooted in real valued functions, which are simulated with floats, but float operations are just bitwise operations underneath. The only issue is that GPUs operate on floats and standard ML theory works over real numbers.
I’m really curious how this scales up. Bonsai delivers an 8B model in 1.15 GB. How large would a 27B or 35B model be? Would it still retain the accuracy of those large models? If the scaling holds, we could see 100+B models in 64 GB of RAM.
Feels a bit like gradually moving back toward analog circuits, step by step.
There is less and less need for the precision that digital circuits provide.
I'm very skeptical of the advantage they're claiming here. The whitepaper [0] only compares these to full precision models, when the more interesting (and probably more meaningful) comparison would be with other quantized models with a similar memory footprint.
Especially considering that these models seem to more or less just be quantized variants of Qwen3 with custom kernels and other inference optimizations (?) rather than fine tuned or trained from scratch with a new architecture, I am very surprised (or suspicious rather) that they didn't do the obvious comparison with a quantized Qwen3.
Their (to my knowledge) new measure/definition of intelligence seems reasonable, but introducing something like this without thorough benchmarking + model comparison is even more of a red flag to me.
Oh, boy.
This good tool hates my LM Studio...
The following message appears when I run Bonsai in my LM Studio.
I think my settings have done something wrong.
``
Failed to load the model
Error loading model.
(Exit code: null). Please check the settings and try loading the model again.
``
Do I need to build their llama.cpp fork from source?
Looks like they only offer CUDA options in the release page, which I think might support CPU mode but refuses to even run without CUDA installed. Seems a bit odd to me, I thought the whole point was supporting low end devices!
Edit: 30 minutes of C++ compile time later, I got it running. Although it uses 7GB of RAM then hangs at Loading model. I thought this thing was less memory hungry than 4 bit quants?
Edit 2: Got the 4B version running, but at 0.1 tok/s and the output seemed to be nonsensical. For comparison I can run, on the same machine, qwen 3.5 4B model (at 4 bit quant) correctly and about 50x faster.
This looks very promising. It would be cool if support for Bonsai-style models would land in mainline MLX soon, looking forward to trying it out.
It seems PrismML has implemented a better version of an idea I had a while back: what if we had a 1-bit model where the scale of the weight is determined by its position. The model would have to be trained from the ground up for this though, which is why I never tried it. The interleaved scale factor approach of Bonsai is a much more flexible approach at almost the same cost.
Interesting parallel to spiking neural networks — they're essentially 1-bit communication (spike or no spike) with analog membrane potentials. We use 5k Izhikevich neurons for quadruped locomotion control and they beat PPO at the same sample budget. The efficiency argument for 1-bit goes beyond LLMs.
The site says 14x less memory usage. I'm a bit confused about that situation. The model file is indeed very small, but on my machine it used roughly the same RAM as 4 bit quants (on CPU).
Though I couldn't get actual English output from it, so maybe something went wrong while running it.
They link the (free) locally.ai iPhone app, but the bonsai model doesn't present in the list. You have to get it via settings.
On my ancient SE-2, Siri integration falls down, but the chat in their app runs about half the speed I can read. So far, more than 50% correct, and usable (and seems to speed up as you use it).
I'll try it just to clean up input in a pipeline to another model. I gave it a paragraph from the NYTimes and it did a great job, so it should be good at correcting voice input and keyboard typos.
153 comments
I tried a few things with it. Got it driving Cursor, which in itself was impressive - it handled some tool usage. Via cursor I had it generate a few web page tests.
On a monte carlo simulation of pi, it got the logic correct but failed to build an interface to start the test. Requesting changes mostly worked, but left over some symbols which caused things to fail. Required a bit of manual editing.
Tried a Simon Wilson pelican as well - very abstract, not recognizable at all as a bird or a bicycle.
Pictures of the results here: https://x.com/pwnies/status/2039122871604441213
There doesn't seem to be a demo link on their webpage, so here's a llama.cpp running on my local desktop if people want to try it out. I'll keep this running for a couple hours past this post: https://unfarmable-overaffirmatively-euclid.ngrok-free.dev
Strongly agree that the knowledge density is impressive for the being a 1-bit model with such a small size and blazing fast response
Results: 8 passed, 0 failed, 17 errored out of 25
That puts it right between Qwen3.5-4B (7/25) and Nanbeige4.1-3B (9/25) for example, but it took only 200 seconds for the whole test. Qwen3.5 took 976 seconds and Nanbeige over 2000 (although both of these were on my 1070 so not quite the same hardware)
Granite 7B 4bit does the test in 199 seconds but only gets 4/25 correct.
See https://sql-benchmark.nicklothian.com/#all-data (click on the cells for the trace of each question)
Errors are bad tool calls (vs failures which is incorrect SQL)
I used @freakynit's runpod (thanks!)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47597268
For its size (1.2GB download) it's very impressive.
Here's a pelican it drew me running on my phone - the SVG comments are good, the image not so much: https://tools.simonwillison.net/svg-render#%3Csvg%20width%3D...
https://ofo1j9j6qh20a8-80.proxy.runpod.net
The server can serve 5 parallel request, with each request capped at around13Ktokens...A bit of of benchmarks I did:
1. Input: 700 tokens, ttfs: ~0 second, outputs: 1822 tokens ~190t/s
1. Input: 6400+ tokens, ttfs: ~2 second, outputs: 2012 tokens at ~135t/s
Vram usage was consistently at ~4GiB.
Then found out they didn't implement AVX2 for their Q1_0_g128 CPU kernel. Added that and getting ~12t/s which isn't shabby for this old machine.
Cool model.
> *Fathers of Harry and James Potter*: - Sirius Black is the *father* of *James Potter* (the older brother of Harry).
> - James Potter is *Harry's uncle* and the *older brother* of *Luna Lovegood*.
> - This means *Sirius and James are Harry's uncles*, though they are *father and brother*.
https://pastebin.com/WAAmFKfX
Especially considering that these models seem to more or less just be quantized variants of Qwen3 with custom kernels and other inference optimizations (?) rather than fine tuned or trained from scratch with a new architecture, I am very surprised (or suspicious rather) that they didn't do the obvious comparison with a quantized Qwen3.
Their (to my knowledge) new measure/definition of intelligence seems reasonable, but introducing something like this without thorough benchmarking + model comparison is even more of a red flag to me.
[0] https://github.com/PrismML-Eng/Bonsai-demo/blob/main/1-bit-b...
Failed to load the model Error loading model. (Exit code: null). Please check the settings and try loading the model again.``Do I need to build their llama.cpp fork from source?
Looks like they only offer CUDA options in the release page, which I think might support CPU mode but refuses to even run without CUDA installed. Seems a bit odd to me, I thought the whole point was supporting low end devices!
Edit: 30 minutes of C++ compile time later, I got it running. Although it uses 7GB of RAM then hangs at Loading model. I thought this thing was less memory hungry than 4 bit quants?
Edit 2: Got the 4B version running, but at 0.1 tok/s and the output seemed to be nonsensical. For comparison I can run, on the same machine, qwen 3.5 4B model (at 4 bit quant) correctly and about 50x faster.
It seems PrismML has implemented a better version of an idea I had a while back: what if we had a 1-bit model where the scale of the weight is determined by its position. The model would have to be trained from the ground up for this though, which is why I never tried it. The interleaved scale factor approach of Bonsai is a much more flexible approach at almost the same cost.
https://huggingface.co/prism-ml/Bonsai-8B-gguf
tensor 'token_embd.weight' has invalid ggml type 41. should be in [0, 41) loader knows tensor types 0..40, but the model contains type 41
Though I couldn't get actual English output from it, so maybe something went wrong while running it.
(math: - log error / model size = 1 <-> error / model size = 1/e )
I'm currently setting this one up, if it works well with a custom LoRa ontop ill be able to run two at once for my custom memory management system :D
They link the (free) locally.ai iPhone app, but the bonsai model doesn't present in the list. You have to get it via settings.
On my ancient SE-2, Siri integration falls down, but the chat in their app runs about half the speed I can read. So far, more than 50% correct, and usable (and seems to speed up as you use it).
I'll try it just to clean up input in a pipeline to another model. I gave it a paragraph from the NYTimes and it did a great job, so it should be good at correcting voice input and keyboard typos.
Can't wait to give it a spin with ollama, if ollama could list it as a model that would be helpful.