AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Raman-01 – A Pocket Physics Solver LLM
I built a tiny physics solver LLM that performs surprisingly well on easy-to-medium difficulty physics problems. Most LLMs today still struggle with physics QA (as PhyBench recently highlighted), so I wanted to see how far I could push a small model with careful data and minimal compute. Model: Qwen3-1.7B Supervised Finetuning: ~1500 curated examples spanning kinematics, EM, acoustics, and more RL Fine-tuning: GRPO, 1-shot RLVR style (single example, 70 steps) Total cost: ~$5 on H100 It started with a cold-start SFT (~3 epochs, loss to 0.3), then I ran RL with accuracy reward that climbed…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
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 →
- 2
TensorZero▲307Hi HN! We're Gabriel & Viraj, and we're excited to open source TensorZero. To be a little cheeky, TensorZero is an open-source platform that helps LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products. 1. Integrate our model gateway 2. Send metrics or feedback 3. Unlock compounding improvements in quality, cost, and latency It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying: • Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead • Observability: inference & feedback → your database • Optimization: better prompts, models, inference strategies • Experimentation:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3TL
2023 · tinyllms.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 4
Hi HN community, I have been working on benchmarking publicly available LLMs these past couple of weeks. More precisely, I am interested on the finetuning piece since a lot of businesses are starting to entertain the idea of self-hosting LLMs trained on their proprietary data rather than relying on third party APIs. To this point, I am tracking the following 4 pillars of evaluation that businesses are typically look into: - Performance - Time to train an LLM - Cost to train an LLM - Inference (throughput / latency / cost per token) For each LLM, my aim is to benchmark them for…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Hi everyone, I started working on nanoeuler after the ban of anthropic's fable because my ambition and dream is to work in the AI field in anthropic. The two interesting reasons that led me to create nanoeuler were (1) interfacing with llm does not mean understanding how they are composed and (2), working on llm with a very low-level layer to understand the correlation between parameters and data and growth of the model and how the GPU works and how some layers can be optimized. So I started working on it with a research aspect by making nanoeuler grow more and more but doing one step after…
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Hi HN, I was once given the advice: Don't waste expensive frontier model credits (GPT/Claude/etc.) on bulk work. Send the boring, repetitive, high-volume jobs to a smaller model, and save the expensive prompts for when you actually need frontier-level reasoning. I complained and told my manager that I shouldnt have to think about using certain models for certain coding tasks, and that one model should handle everything. Well, here we are anyway. If anyone needs a place to absolutely abuse an LLM with high-volume tasks, come beat ours up at https://yolo-auto.com. Here are…
Jul 2026 · yolo-auto.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Minimal, readable LLM post-training experiments on one 8GB GPU. Measures forgetting, seed variance, and RL emergence. - pochenai/nano-llm-posttraining
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8TT
For the last few weeks, I have been working on training an LLM from scratch and deploying it in production on Google Cloud Platform. Finally, I trained a 30 million parameter model on 1 billion tokens and deployed it as a web service. You can access the LLM using this site - https://kunalmishra.info The following steps were taken to build Tiny Tales GPT 1. Downloaded and preprocessed 8GB of dataset using multiprocessing library. 2. Tokenized the data using byte pair encoding to create 1 billion tokens sharded in different bin files. 3. Defined a training setup and trained the model…
2024 · kunalmishra.info · its alternatives →
- 9
Hi HN, I built OpenGraviton, an open-source AI inference engine that pushes the limits of running extremely large LLMs on consumer hardware. By combining 1.58-bit ternary quantization, dynamic sparsity with Top-K pruning and MoE routing, and mmap-based layer streaming, OpenGraviton can run models far larger than your system RAM—even on a Mac Mini. Early benchmarks: TinyLlama-1.1B drops from ~2GB (FP16) to ~0.24GB with ternary quantization. At 140B scale, models that normally require ~280GB fit within ~35GB packed. Optimized for Apple Silicon with Metal + C++ tensor unpacking, plus…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10TF
I’d originally launched my app: Private LLM[1][2] on HN around 10 months ago, with a single RedPajama Chat 3B model. The app has come a long way since then. About a month ago, I added support for 4-bit OmniQuant quantized Mixtral 8x7B Instruct model, and it seems to outperform Q4 models at inference speed and Q8 models at text generation quality, while consuming only about 24GB of RAM[3] at 8k context length. The trick is: a) to use a better quantization algorithm and b) to use unquantized embeddings and the MoE gates (the overhead is quite small). Other notable features include many more…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 11
I made this after seeing someone posit the idea online yesterday over lunch then spent some time refining it. So far it's pretty impressive IMO! Right now I am running Qwen3-30B-A3B on my 24gb unified memory m4 MacBook Pro at 50 tok/sec and this should definitely not be working for such a large model on my middling hardware. Things are detailed in the README to get up and running and DESIGN.md has details on all the choices and such made along the way.
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
The smallest async RL trainer I could write: one loop that runs REINFORCE on CartPole on a laptop and async GRPO on a cluster (e.g. 8xH100 trainer, 8 vLLM workers, ran as a [SkyPilot job group](https://docs.skypilot.ai/en/latest/examples/job-groups.html) on k8s ). All without Ray or TRL or DeepSpeed etc., workers talk to the trainer over stdlib HTTP.
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
An educational Rust project for exporting and running inference on Qwen3 LLM family - reinterpretcat/qwen3-rs
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Hi there, looking for feedback on my new project "Featherless.AI" The idea is to allow users to run all the models on hugging face instantly. Via the OpenAI API compatible endpoint. Why? Because its a real chore to download models and spin up GPUs, especially if you want to test multiple models. Not to mention GPUs cost multiple dollars an hour to rent. And if we want more people to use open source AI, we got to make it easier for them to try and play with all of them. So what if instead of spinning up dedicated GPUs per model (which is what every provider is doing) We can startup a LLM…
2024 · featherless.ai · its alternatives →
- 15
Hey folks, I’m the creator of WFGY — a semantic reasoning framework for LLMs. After open-sourcing it, I did a full technical and value audit — and realized this engine might be worth $8M–$17M based on AI module licensing norms. If embedded as part of a platform core, the valuation could exceed $30M. Too late to pull it back. So here it is — fully free, open-sourced under MIT. --- ### What does it solve? Current LLMs (even GPT-4+) lack *self-consistent reasoning*. They struggle with: - Fragmented logic across turns - No internal loopback or self-calibration - No modular thought units - Weak…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16IB
Hey HN, I've been working on something cool that I wanted to share with you all. It's called Viewpoint, an analytics tool for LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic models, and Gemini. The idea came from the constant flood of new LLM models and the need to figure out which ones work best for my projects without breaking the bank. With viewpoint, I can track token usage, costs, latency(WIP), and traffic over time, making it easier to compare different models and see which ones perform best and save money. The tool works asynchronously, so it doesn't add any latency to your LLM requests, and you have…
2024 · viewpointhq.com · its alternatives →
- 17HF
We have a massive GPU cluster and developed our own infrastructure to manage the cluster and train massive models. There's how it works: 1. You upload the dataset with preconfigured format into HuggingFaсe [1]. 2. Choose your LLM (e.g. LLaMa 70B, Mistral 7B) 3. Place your submission into the queue 4. Wait for it to get trained. 5. Then you get your trained model there on HuggingFace. Essentially, why would we want to do it? 1. We already have an experience with training big LLMs. 2. We could achieve near-perfect infrastructure performance for training. 3. Sometimes GPUs have just nothing to…
2023 · higgsfield.xyz · its alternatives →
- 18
I thought it'd be interesting to use Linux PSI (Pressure Stall Information) for an LLM runtime to trim the KV cache. This is mainly useful imo for edge devices like the Jetson Orin super nano kit which have unified memory. I haven't benched much, but plan to do so more over time and see if I can make a real use of it as I run local LLMs. Let me know if it makes sense :P (I of course vibed this idea)
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
I've built an airgapped Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for question-answering on documents, running entirely offline with local inference. Using Llama 3, Mistral, and Gemini, this setup allows secure, private NLP on your own machine. Perfect for researchers, data scientists, and developers who need to process sensitive data without cloud dependencies. Built with Llama C++, LangChain, and Streamlit, it supports quantized models and provides a sleek UI for document processing. Check it out, contribute, or suggest new features!
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20IL
2025 · chr15m.github.io · its alternatives →
- 21PP
I've been working on applying LLMs to long-context, verifiable problems over the past year, and today I'm releasing a benchmark of 62,000 pencil puzzles across 94 types (sudoku, nonori, slitherlink, etc.). The benchmark also allows for intermediate checks /rule breaks for all varieties at any step. I tested 51 models against a subset (300 puzzles) in two modes: single-shot (output the full solution) and agentic (iterate with verifier feedback). Some results: - Best model (GPT 5.2@xhigh) solves 56%. (~ half the puzzles are unsolved by any model) - Agentic solves average 29 turns. The…
Mar 2026 · ppbench.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Hi HN, While building RAG agents, I noticed a lot of token budget was wasted on formatting overhead (HTML tags, JSON structure, whitespace). Existing solutions felt too heavy (often requiring torch/transformers), so I wrote this lightweight, zero-dependency library to solve it. It includes strategies for context packing, PII redaction, and tool output compression. Benchmarks show it can save ~15% of tokens with negligible latency overhead (<0.5ms). Happy to answer any questions!
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Hey HN! I built Experiment to solve a common frustration in LLM development: the lack of proper tools for prompt engineering experimentation. Here's what makes it different: Key Features: - Load and edit chat completion logs from CSV files - Fork and modify specific conversation entries - Run inference via Anthropic, Mistral, and OpenAI - Define custom tools using JSONSchema format - Visual tool usage analysis with collapsible, sorted key-value pairs - Full mobile support and available as installable PWA Technical Highlights: - Built with React using custom isomorphic architecture -…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24IB
After fine-tuning GPT for a personal project, I realized how tedious it is to write plain text in a massive JSON file. That's why I built this app for my own use, and I want to see if others could benefit from a tool like this as well ;)
2024 · finetuna-ui.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →