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 — 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 ~22K–30K tokens per parameter. Ratios like 7K:1, 15K:1, and 22K:1 all work fine — TinyStories and most sub-3M community models sit in this range. Push much further and benchmarks start rotting.
A code-specialized MoE carved out of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B by pure expert pruning — no fine-tuning, no distillation. I profiled all 256 experts on balanced corpora plus targeted code benchmarks (LiveCodeBench + MultiPL-E), built a competence map with the code classes up-weighted 1.5×, and dropped the 72 weakest experts per layer (256→184, ~35B→27B). Router, attention, norms, the MTP head and the vision tower are all preserved; active params stay at A3B and routing is baked to top-10 (revert to top-8 anytime).
27B footprint, A3B speed, coding that punches well above its size — and the preserved MTP head gives you speculative decoding out of the box (text + vision).