---
license: agpl-3.0
library_name: pytorch
tags:
- tiny-lm
- goldfish
- transformer
- rope
- swiglu
pipeline_tag: text-generation
base_model: []
---

# GlubLM (36M)

> *the language model that already forgot this sentence*

**GlubLM** is a 36-million-parameter transformer that plays the character of a goldfish with a 10-second memory. Inspired by [GuppyLM](https://github.com/arman-bd/guppylm) by Arman BD and Ted Lasso's meditation on the goldfish as "the happiest animal on earth", GlubLM has a hard 96-token context window - it *physically* cannot remember what was just said.

Try it live: [browser demo](https://den-sec.github.io/glublm/) | [pixel-art desk pet](https://den-sec.github.io/glublm/desk-pet/)

## Architecture

- **Parameters**: 36,055,680 (36.1M)
- **Layers**: 8 decoder-only transformer blocks
- **Hidden dim**: 640
- **Attention heads**: 10 (head dim 64)
- **FFN dim**: 1280 (SwiGLU, effective intermediate 2560)
- **Normalization**: RMSNorm
- **Position encoding**: Rotary (RoPE)
- **Vocabulary**: 5,120 Byte-Level BPE
- **Max context**: 96 tokens (hard cap, the "10-second memory")
- **Weight-tied LM head**
- **No bias terms**

## Intended use

This model is a toy. It exists to:
1. Explore the design tension between "small + simple" (GuppyLM's thesis) and "small + modern" (GlubLM's hypothesis)
2. Demonstrate an LLM-generated dataset pipeline using a multi-agent Claude team
3. Be a fun browser demo and a pixel-art desk pet companion

**Do not use GlubLM for anything serious.** It literally forgets within a sentence.

## Training data

Trained on [`DenSec02/glublm-60k-ted`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/DenSec02/glublm-60k-ted), a 60,549-sample dataset of single-turn goldfish conversations generated by a team of four coordinated Claude agents (generator, critic, diversifier, persona-guardian). Composition: v4 balanced mix (20K poetic + 15K supplement + 5K conversational + 15K forgetful) augmented with v5.1 empathic/introspective hotfix (1K samples) + v5.2 multi-anchor self-awareness recovery (500 samples).

**Explicit exclusions**: no references to football, soccer, coaches, teams, or any Ted Lasso show characters.

## Training

- **Hardware**: NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB (local)
- **Framework**: PyTorch 2.x, BF16 mixed precision
- **Optimizer**: AdamW (b1=0.9, b2=0.95), weight decay 0.1
- **LR schedule**: cosine with 5% warmup, peak 3e-4
- **Batch size**: 64
- **Epochs**: 15
- **Dropout**: 0.1 (residual), 0.0 (attention)
- **Gradient clipping**: 1.0
- **Final loss**: 1.1442
- **Wall time**: ~15 minutes

## Evaluation (v2 cross-model judge)

Dual-judge evaluation using Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7 on a 30-prompt rubric across 4 axes (integer 1-5 scale). Each axis aggregates 30 prompts x 3 seeds x 2 passes = 180 scoring rows per judge.

### Per-axis score (mean)

| Axis | Sonnet 4.6 | Opus 4.7 |
|---|---:|---:|
| Conversational Quality | 4.01 | 4.15 |
| Goldfish Identity | 3.89 | 3.67 |
| Forgetful Trait | 3.80 | 3.81 |
| Length Appropriateness | 4.77 | 4.57 |

### Cross-judge agreement (Cohen's quadratic-weighted kappa)

| Axis | Kappa | Interpretation |
|---|---:|---|
| Conversational Quality | 0.77 | substantial |
| Goldfish Identity | 0.83 | almost perfect |
| Forgetful Trait | 0.86 | almost perfect |
| Length Appropriateness | 0.59 | moderate |

**Interpretation**: Sonnet and Opus agree almost perfectly on 3/4 axes, validating that the rubric is interpretable consistently across LLM judges. Opus tends to be systematically ~0.2 stricter than Sonnet on the Identity axis (stricter rubric application, not judge bias).

Full methodology + 108-row long-format scores: [`eval/report_crossmodel.md`](https://github.com/Den-Sec/glublm/blob/master/eval/report_crossmodel.md).

## Limitations & biases

- **Hard context limit**: 96 tokens. Inputs longer than a few short sentences will be truncated.
- **Goldfish worldview**: the model genuinely does not understand human abstractions outside the bowl.
- **Dataset bias**: the dataset was generated by Claude (Anthropic), so it inherits Claude's language patterns filtered through the goldfish persona.
- **Single-turn only**: multi-turn memory is a non-goal.
- **English only**.
- **Stochastic and occasionally incoherent**: 36M params on 60K samples is small. Do not expect reliability.

## How to use

```python
from glublm.config import ModelConfig
from glublm.model import GlubLM
from glublm.tokenizer import GlubTokenizer
from glublm.inference import generate
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
from safetensors.torch import load_model

tok_path = hf_hub_download("DenSec02/glublm-36m", "tokenizer.json")
weights_path = hf_hub_download("DenSec02/glublm-36m", "model.safetensors")

tok = GlubTokenizer.from_file(tok_path)
cfg = ModelConfig(vocab_size=tok.vocab_size)
model = GlubLM(cfg)
load_model(model, weights_path)

print(generate(model=model, tokenizer=tok, prompt="hello", max_new_tokens=24))
```

Or try it in-browser with zero setup:
- [Chat demo](https://den-sec.github.io/glublm/) (simple web UI)
- [Desk pet companion](https://den-sec.github.io/glublm/desk-pet/) (pixel-art PWA)
- [Colab notebook](https://colab.research.google.com/github/Den-Sec/glublm/blob/master/notebooks/train_colab.ipynb) (train your own goldfish)

## License

AGPL-3.0 - see [LICENSE](https://github.com/Den-Sec/glublm/blob/master/LICENSE).

## Citation

```bibtex
@software{glublm_2026,
  author       = {Sepede, Dennis},
  title        = {GlubLM: a 36M goldfish language model with a 10-second memory},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://github.com/Den-Sec/glublm}
}
```