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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Bonsai – A Competitive Ternary Weight LLM

Introducing Bonsai 0.5B, one of the first ternary-weight LLMs to rival full-precision models of similar size, such as Qwen 2.5 0.5B and MobileLLM 0.5B. Trained on just 3.8B tokens, using 1,000x less data than other models, Bonsai redefines what’s possible for ultra-efficient training in low-bit models. Next, we're building larger and more powerful ternary-weight models for the edge. Technical Report: https://github.com/deepgrove-ai/Bonsai/blob/main/paper/Bonsa... Model (Unpacked): https://huggingface.co/deepgrove/Bonsai Reach us:…

Bonsai is a 0.5-billion parameter language model using ternary weights, designed to run efficiently on edge devices. It matches the performance of similar full-precision models while trained on just 3.8 billion tokens… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    PrismML builds 1-bit and ternary Bonsai models that pack advanced reasoning, tool use, and multimodal AI into phones, laptops, and efficient data centers.

    Mar 2026 · prismml.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    We took a recently released Bonsai 1.7B ternary model from PrismML (https://github.com/PrismML-Eng/Bonsai-demo) and ran our agentic evolution search on it for 6 hours to optimize the Metal kernels. The search was fully autonomous. Measured against unmodified upstream llama.cpp at the same Bonsai/Q2_0 commit, same M4 Max: - tg128: 309.82 → 442.42 t/s (+42.0%) - pp512: 4250.32 → 4622.63 t/s (+8.8%)

    May 2026 · agents2agents.ai · its alternatives →

  3. 3WB
  4. 4

    I've been doing some data cleaning for my fine tuning projects using LLMs, and decided to just build a package for it as a side project. Check it out here: https://github.com/databonsai/databonsai Some features: - categorization (labelling), transformation and decomposition (text into structured format) - validates llm outputs - batch mode batches up the inputs/outputs so you don't send the prompt (schema, fewshot examples) for every row of data, saving a significant amount of tokens There are some similarities to the Instructor repo, but this is simpler and made for…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    0.8B-9B native multimodal w/ more intelligence, less compute

    Mar 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  7. 7RP

    The excitement surrounding PrismML’s 1-bit/ternary Bonsai models has the industry closely watching how smartphone giants, particularly Apple, will implement LLMs on edge devices. Moving AI on-device is a brilliant and necessary strategy. It ensures absolute user privacy in alignment with EU regulations, fundamentally shifts the economics away from costly cloud inference, and paves the way for a significant hardware upgrade supercycle as users seek true AI-capable silicon. To create a smart on-device "Semantic Router," models need to reach the 27B+ parameter scale. Achieving this on a…

    Jul 2026 · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    I spent a lot of time and money on this rather big side project of mine that attempts to replicate the mechanistic interpretability research on proprietary LLMs that was quite popular this year and produced great research papers by Anthropic [1], OpenAI [2] and Deepmind [3]. I am quite proud of this project and since I consider myself the target audience for HackerNews did I think that maybe some of you would appreciate this open research replication as well. Happy to answer any questions or face any feedback. Cheers [1]…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    I've been playing around with https://github.com/zphang/minimal-llama/ and https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora/blob/main/finetune.py, and wanted to create a simple UI where you can just paste text, tweak the parameters, and finetune the model quickly using a modern GPU. To prepare the data, simply separate your text with two blank lines. There's an inference tab, so you can test how the tuned model behaves. This is my first foray into the world of LLM finetuning, Python, Torch, Transformers, LoRA, PEFT, and Gradio. Enjoy!

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    Bonsai▲475

    Contracts, invoices, and expenses for digital freelancers

    2015 · hellobonsai.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11
    Bonsai▲105

    AI programming platform for enterprises

    2017 · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Business, project and billing management solution used by 500,000+ small businesses globally.

    2016 · hellobonsai.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hi HN, We just opened public access to Qwen3‑Coder‑480B‑A35B‑Instruct via a REST/SDK API. Why it might be interesting: - Fully open-source (Apache‑2.0): https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-Coder - 480B params (35B active MoE), long context up to 1M tokens with YaRN - Matches Claude Sonnet/GPT‑4o on SWE-Bench Verified (81.6%) - Free tier: 100K tokens/month

    2023 · netmind.ai · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hi HN! I'm just sharing a project I've been working on during the LLM Efficiency Challenge - you can now finetune Llama with QLoRA 5x faster than Huggingface's original implementation on your own local GPU. Some highlights: 1. Manual autograd engine - hand derived backprop steps. 2. QLoRA / LoRA 80% faster, 50% less memory. 3. All kernels written in OpenAI's Triton language. 4. 0% loss in accuracy - no approximation methods - all exact. 5. No change of hardware necessary. Supports NVIDIA GPUs since 2018+. CUDA 7.5+. 6. Flash Attention support via Xformers. 7. Supports 4bit and 16bit…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15
    LLaMA▲118

    A foundational, 65-billion-parameter large language model

    2023 · research.facebook.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    I am excited to announce the release of TabPFN v2, a tabular foundation model that delivers state-of-the-art predictions on small datasets in just 2.8 seconds for classification and 4.8 seconds for regression compared to strong baselines tuned for 4 hours. Published in Nature, this model outperforms traditional methods on datasets with up to 10,000 samples and 500 features. The model is available under an open license: a derivative of the Apache 2 license with a single modification, adding an enhanced attribution requirement inspired by the Llama 3 license:…

    2025 · nature.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Last week was big for open source LLMs. We got: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) - Gemma-3 (27b) - DeepSeek-v3-0324 And a couple weeks ago we got the new mistral-ocr model. We updated our OCR benchmark to include the new models. We evaluated 1,000 documents for JSON extraction accuracy. Major takeaways: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) are by far the most impressive. Both landed right around 75% accuracy (equivalent to GPT-4o’s performance). Qwen 72b was only 0.4% above 32b. Within the margin of error. - Both Qwen models passed mistral-ocr (72.2%), which is specifically trained for OCR. - Gemma-3…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18MP
  19. 19
    LLM Gatewayfree tier▲296

    I built an OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway that routes requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, vLLM, llama-server, SGLang... anything that speaks /v1/chat/completions. Single Go binary, one YAML config file, no infrastructure. It does the things you'd expect from this kind of gateway... semantic routing via a three-layer cascade (keyword heuristics, embedding similarity, LLM classifier) that picks the best model when clients omit the model field, weighted round-robin load balancing across local inference servers with health checks and failover. The part I think is most…

    2025 · llmgateway.io · its alternatives →

  20. 20
    Qwen 2.5▲290

    Alibaba's latest AI model series

    2025 · qwenlm.github.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21
    QwQ-32B▲197

    Matching R1 reasoning yet 20x smaller

    2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Ollama for classical ML models. AOT compiler that turns XGBoost, LightGBM, scikit-learn, CatBoost & ONNX models into native C99 inference code. One command to load, one command to serve. 336x faster than Python inference. - kossisoroyce/timber

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23
    StableLM▲146

    Stability AI's language models

    2023 · stability.ai · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Build your own high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA - a smaller version of vLLM - jmaczan/tiny-vllm

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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