---
title: OpenBallast
emoji: 💻
colorFrom: green
colorTo: pink
sdk: static
pinned: true
license: cc-by-4.0
short_description: Just download more VRAM
---
# ⚓ OpenBallast

**We measured how much of a bigger model's factual advantage is just memorized
trivia, and whether you can buy that back with a file instead of with
parameters. You can, and it's 40–100× cheaper per byte.**

Small models reason fine — they just don't *know* much. Parameters are the most
expensive place to store facts (~100× more bytes per fact than a compressed triple
corpus). OpenBallast builds **ballasts**: versioned, CC0, rank-quantized knowledge
artifacts you pair with any local model — pick your knowledge level like you pick
a GGUF quant.

**Measured** (two model families, 50,147 linked probes + a 43,137-probe
hallucination suite):

- Raw, Gemma-4's 2B/4B/12B score 61/66/68%; given the same corpus to look
  facts up in, all three land at 87–91%. Replicates on Qwen3.5 (0.8B–9B: raw
  32–54%, ballasted 77–83%, and the ballasted 4B beats the ballasted 9B).
  Size gaps are mostly memorization gaps.
- A 2B + a **470 MB** file beats the 12B raw with a real, non-generative
  lookup in the loop; the parameter route costs ~19 GB. Hallucination on
  answerable questions: 0.24 → 0.07.
- Grounding cuts multi-hop hallucination 3–20× but *raises* fabrication on
  unanswerable questions — it fixes answerable questions, it does not teach
  abstention.
- Ballasted accuracy doubles as a 4-bit damage diagnostic: nf4 breaks some
  models and not others, unpredictably from size, and only the grounded
  score tells you which.
- Corpora tuned to a specific model's knowledge gaps lose to the one generic
  corpus at every size — a decisive negative result.

- 📦 [ballast-t0](https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenBallast/ballast-t0) — the corpus, 8 quantization levels, CC0
- 🧪 [ballast-evalsets](https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenBallast/ballast-evalsets) — 50k recall probes + 43k hallucination probes
- 📖 [Thesis + methodology + numbers](https://github.com/OpenBallast/ballast)
- ⚡ Live demo endpoint (MCP): `https://mcp.openballast.org` — runs on a $0/month stack