Today we wanted to release BananaMind 2 Pico, our smallest model yet at ~0.9M parameters. Instead, we accidentally ran a very expensive experiment on what happens when you push a tiny model way past its useful token budget.
Short version: we trained on 200B tokens (~222K:1 tokens-per-parameter). The model peaked at 20B tokens with an INT Index of 4.55, then degraded monotonically over the next 160B to 3.31 โ a 27% regression. Three of four Open SLM benchmarks were worse at the end of training than they were at 10% through.
The useful compute-optimal range for Pico-tier models looks like ~22Kโ30K tokens per parameter. Ratios like 7K:1, 15K:1, and 22K:1 all work fine โ TinyStories and most sub-3M community models sit in this range. Push much further and benchmarks start rotting.
We're excited to release BananaMind 2 SLMoE, an experimental sequence-level mixture-of-experts model. It uses only 8M parameters per message but has 25M total parameters, 13 experts (out of 64) are selected based on the message prefix and reused for the entire response. We're testing with this sequence-level architecture to find out how big the capability loss actually is and how much of it can be fixed. The long-term idea is that this could make very large sparse models usable on machines that can't fit them in RAM by putting the entire model (which is big) on disk and only loading the active parts into VRAM. This architecture is still in research and shouldn't be used for production models.
We trained it on 60B tokens (of FineWeb-HQ, FineWeb-Edu, DCLM ,Cosmopedia v2, FineMath and NPSet-2) on 8 RTX Pro 6000s.
We're excited to release BananaMind 2 Micro, our smallest model yet. It fits a compact architecture in only 2.9M parameters achieving the highest parameter efficiency on BananaMind Base Bench against comparable models. It achieves comparable performance to GPT S2 5M and GPT S 5M at almost half the size while beating CMA 1M Mini. BananaMind 2 Micro achieved the #1 spot on the Open SLM Leaderboard for the sub 3M category (not added yet but it achieves #1) For the training we used Muon + the XSA Refresh Gate with a 5e-2 lr for Muon and 4e-3 for the 1D weights. Its score on our efficiency measure is 0.326 getting the first place with Syn 2.6M on the second place scoring 0.291 and GPT S 5M at 0.235* Check it out at BananaMind/BananaMind-2-Micro and follow us at: @vovaRL @DedeProGames @Banaxi-Tech
We're exited to announce BananaMind OS, our OS specically for running BananaMind models! Its able to run BananaMind 2 Nano at 4 bit on only 7-8MB of ram, the 2 bit on 6MB of ram and the 8 bit version on 14MB of RAM! It runs on a 486 or newer! Check out this video and image running BananaMind 2 Nano 4 Bit on 9 MB of RAM and a emulated 486 in QEMU at ~1TPS! We asked it: "What is the first letter of the alphabet?" The response is: "The first letter of the alphabet is: - A. " And if you're asking because of the video, yes I am a arch btw. Comment and like this post for a GitHub link and comment for adding other models!
BananaMind 2 Pro got better! Release on August 13-14 Follow our team for BananaMind 2 Ultra: @vovaRL for training code @Banaxi-Tech @DedeProGames for providing compute
We did an experiment, we wanted to see if AI is good enough to train models. We used GPT 5.6 Sol Max for this because its one of the most powerful ones right now. Our instructions were, it should write the training code, and start the training process and monitor it by itself. We also gave it a link to BananaMind 2 Mini to get our architecture right. The result: It worked, it made the working BananaMind 2 Nano, and even beat our previous MiniBananaMind v4 9M. Its getting way easier to develop your own models now!
We're excited to release BananaMind 2 Pro Preview, our best model yet. Trained on ~52B tokens it performs extremely good for its token and size class. We trained it on a single 5070 Ti in about 11 days. Check it out at BananaMind/BananaMind-2-Pro-Preview. Sadly we need to delay BananaMind 2 Micro until the launch of the final BananaMind 2 Pro. We will release the final checkpoint with 100B tokens in ~11 days. Go and fine-tune it! We've also released BananaMind 2 Pro Preview Chat which is the instruct version of it! BananaMind/BananaMind-2-Pro-Preview-Chat
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