Borealis 4B Instruct MLX (Preview)

Release: Dec 22nd, 2025.

Model summary

NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview-mlx is a MLX 8bit quantized version of a 4B-parameter instruction-tuned preview model intended for early testing and feedback. It is an experiment and should be treated as pre-release quality.

The original model is NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview.

Model	Bits	Format
NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview	BF16	Transformers (safetensors)
NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview-gguf	8	GGUF (`q8_0`)
NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview-gguf	16	GGUF (`f16`)
NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview-gguf	BF16	GGUF (`bf16`)
NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview-mlx	32	MLX
NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview-mlx-8bits	8	MLX (quantized)

This model NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview-mlx-8bits was converted to MLX format from NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview using mlx-lm version 0.29.1.

Use with mlx

pip install mlx-lm

from mlx_lm import load, generate

model, tokenizer = load("NbAiLab/borealis-4b-instruct-preview-mlx-8bits")

prompt = "hei :)"

if tokenizer.chat_template is not None:
    messages = [{"role": "user", "content": prompt}]
    prompt = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
        messages, add_generation_prompt=True
    )

response = generate(model, tokenizer, prompt=prompt, verbose=True)