Laghu: a 152M chat model trained from scratch for $146 of pretraining compute, released fully open. It thinks before it answers (on/off), holds multi-turn conversations and chats, in 163 MB that runs in your browser.
- Base model, new text (Sep-Oct 2026): 0.919 bits per byte vs SmolLM2-135M 0.941 and Falcon-H1-Tiny-90M-Base 0.979 - Chat: level with SmolLM2-135M-Instruct on chat quality and multi-turn, ahead on maths with thinking; behind Falcon-H1-Tiny-90M-Instruct on all three - Thinking on/off, 16K context; runs in the browser, Ollama (ollama run hf.co/udgamlabs/Laghu-GGUF:Q8_0), LM Studio, llama.cpp, MLX and transformers - Every surviving checkpoint with optimiser states, code, recipe, per-item evals, failures and cost