LFM3-1.7B from @LiquidAI is the #1 trending model on the Hub (855 likes). It takes about 1 GB at 4-bit, and in the vendor's own table it beats Qwen3.5 9B on several agent benchmarks.
The edge decision moves from "are small models good enough?" to "which architecture and runtime do I pick?" One 1.7B backbone now ships as text, VL-2B and Omni-2B checkpoints with open weights.
š Architecture and speed ⢠24 layers: 13 gated convolutions (kernel 7), 5 sliding-window attention (256 tokens), 6 global attention, chosen by a search over 14 device and backend targets ⢠llama.cpp Q4_0 at 32K context: 1.8 to 2.8x faster decode than the next model on 3 devices ⢠Full 128K context needs 1.6 GB of KV cache vs 4.3 GB (Qwen3.5-4B) and 5.6 GB (MiniCPM5-2B)
š Liquid AI's table ⢠Average 49.37 vs 47.24 for Qwen3.5 9B; BFCL V4 71.39 vs 62.83; WebArena-Verified 38.42 vs 28.94 ⢠Qwen3.5 9B still wins SWE-bench Verified (51.20 vs 43.40) and GPQA Diamond (80.40 vs 63.37)
š ļø Try it ⢠GGUF (174,177 downloads last month) runs in llama.cpp b11960+, Ollama and LM Studio; MLX 4-bit for Apple Silicon; SGLang for GPUs ⢠llama-cli -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --temp 0.1 --top-k 50 --repeat-penalty 1.1 ⢠Omni-2B runs in the browser in the WebGPU Space
ā ļø Caveats ⢠The numbers are vendor-reported, with no independent reproduction in the sources. The card says it is not for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning.
You know, I can't believe we are actually doing it, literally advancing the frontier at the edge! We've come a long way since the first models on open slm leaderboard, and, as many things that change, performance is one of the main things that has exploded.
7 years ago, the best we had was GPT-2. Today, we got 90m models beating smollm2! I can't barely see what a future with increasingly powerful small models will look like.
All I can say is that the best is yet to come. And will be agentic.