1. Very likely a small model. You can certainly pretrain, but I would grab an existing base model, say Qwen 3 class
2. The new RL method is a breakthrough, classification doesn't need to align with human preferences
3. The new output is an overstatement. It's just a new LM head. Of course autoregressive decoding can be used for classification: it takes just a few tokens to express the output. Think twice: are you sure classification doesn't need few-shot, CoT, or reasoning? All of these depend on auto-regressiveness
4. It carves out a market already existing, which is now served by oversized LLMs (hence overpaid), e.g. LLM as judge, labeling
5. Jevons effect will kick in, promoting more modeling efforts for small budget teams. It might even accelerate RSI
A new model is coming! Its going to take a long time on my 5070 Ti so expect a release in ~1 month. We think this model is going to be SOTA For its size. Our Mini Version will be 25M Parameters and Pro with 140M. The Pro version has a 3072 Context Window (Extensible to up to 6K with RoPE) And the Mini version has a context window of 4096 (Up to 8K with RoPE) Meanwhile we are currently working on a Instruct Version of our BananaMind 1.5 Base.