if you are a tinkerer of small language models and want to stay ahead of what small models can do, follow me!!! seriously, start following people that actually still makes small models
i've made one recently btw
also, i'm keeping an eye on AxiomicLabs leaderboard, looks like the only current alternative to check where the things are going to
though, between us, i think they should add agentic/tool use benchmarks there
BananaMind 2 Nano is the smallest member of the BananaMind 2.0 family — a 10M-parameter language model that shows how much you can squeeze out of a tiny footprint. It uses the family's digit-isolated tokenizer, so it keeps solid arithmetic despite its size, and it's small enough to run just about anywhere.
Trained on 30B tokens in about a day on a single RTX 5070 Ti (16GB), 4096-token context.
Last month we released PixelModel — a neural network whose weights are literally the pixels of a PNG. It was a toy: 202,752 parameters, welded to 32×32 output, trained on six solid-color swatches. It scored FID 566.84 on the Tiny-T2I-Leaderboard, mostly by producing the same yellow noise for every prompt.
Today we're releasing PixelModel v1. It is 8.5× smaller — 23,747 parameters — and it beats v0 on both benchmark metrics while being trained on 20,000 real MS-COCO caption/image pairs instead of six color swatches. The entire model now fits in a 160×149 PNG.
That image is not a visualization of the model. It is the model. All 23,747 weights, one per pixel.
## The catch A 23K-parameter model does not draw sandwiches. With ~1 parameter per training image, the loss-minimizing behavior is to output the average of all plausible images for a caption — caption-conditioned color, light, and layout statistics. Food prompts come out warm and brown; sky prompts come out cool and bright. That is the ceiling for this size class, and we'd rather show it than crop around it.
# cherry on top 🍒 The model generates 600 images (cpu) in 5 (five) seconds. Thats 5000 images in 24 seconds on cpu. The model trained on cpu for just 30 minutes.