AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB
How small can a language model be while still doing something useful? I wanted to find out, and had some spare time over the holidays. Z80-μLM is a character-level language model with 2-bit quantized weights ({-2,-1,0,+1}) that runs on a Z80 with 64KB RAM. The entire thing: inference, weights, chat UI, it all fits in a 40KB .COM file that you can run in a CP/M emulator and hopefully even real hardware! It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations…
Z80-μLM is a character-level language model compressed into a 40KB file that runs on a Z80 processor with 64KB RAM, executable in CP/M emulators or on vintage hardware. It uses 2-bit quantized weights and integer math… 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
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
A few days ago I found myself trying out GLM 5.2 and was really positively impressed. The capabilities and security I was getting from this LLM are similar to those I've gotten from models like Claude or GPT, and this really surprised me. But then I thought, "I wonder how it would work on a normal computer like mine," and above all, "I wonder if it would work without going into OOM on a computer like mine." So I started working with the help of agents to test this possibility. I started converting the model to int4, understanding MTP usage, and if possible implementing DSA for long context.…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Luke from ElevenLabs here. We just released Scribe Realtime v2, our new real-time Speech to Text model. We rebuilt it from the ground up around a new architecture that uses predictive transcription – it anticipates the next likely word before it’s spoken. That makes it both fast (around 150 ms latency) and highly accurate. Scribe v2 Realtime outperforms every low latency transcription model across 30 commonly used EU and Asian languages – 93.5% accuracy, compared to Gemini 2.5 Flash (91.4%), GPT-4o MiniTranscribe (90.7%), and Deepgram Nova 3 (85%). It supports 90+ languages including…
2025 · elevenlabs.io · its alternatives →
- 4
- 5
Qwen3.5 Small▲3550.8B-9B native multimodal w/ more intelligence, less compute
Mar 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
- 6
- 7
Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Have a natural, spoken conversation with AI! Contribute to KoljaB/RealtimeVoiceChat development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
First TTS model to support all 22 Indic languages + English
2024 · its alternatives →
- 10
Hey there, I’m Brian. I've been shipping conversational models over here at Tavus for the past two years. I want to tell you about our new audio-understanding model: Sparrow-2! It’s a new category of model and a unique new approach to conversational audio. Earlier this year we launched Sparrow-1, (at the time) our SoTA turn taking model. Since our Sparrow-1 launch, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to humans talking and trying to really understand how people know when to talk, when to listen, and when to wait. I’ve also been hunting down failure modes of the current SoTA models. And while…
2024 · tavus.io · its alternatives →
- 11
Explore large language models in 512MB of RAM. Contribute to jncraton/languagemodels development by creating an account on GitHub.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Qwen3.5▲288The 397B native multimodal agent with 17B active params
Feb 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →
- 13
The Emotion Engine has 32 MB of RAM total, so the trick is streaming weights from CD-ROM one matrix at a time during the forward pass — only activations, KV cache and embeddings live in RAM. This means models bigger than the RAM can still run, they just read more from disc. Had to build a custom quantized format (PSNT), hack endianness, write a tokenizer pipeline, and most of the PS2 SDK from scratch (releasing that separately). The model itself is also custom — a 10M param Llama-style architecture I trained specifically for this. And it works. On real hardware.
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14WM
Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…
2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →
- 15
Contribute to Mega4alik/ollm development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Al conversations on demand on any topic
2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 17
GLM-5-Turbo▲289High-speed agentic model built specifically for OpenClaw
Mar 2026 · docs.z.ai · its alternatives →
- 18
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 →
- 19
- 20
Inworld TTSfree tier, from $25/mo▲318Hey HN, this is Igor, one of the engineers behind Inworld Runtime, which we're releasing today in public preview. We built it to solve the common problem we and our customers had: engineers spend more time on AI ops and plumbing than on actual feature development. This was often due to the challenge of using Python for I/O-bound, high-concurrency workloads and complexity maintaining pipelines with streams that use always-changing ML models. Our solution is a high-performance runtime written in C++ with the core idea of defining AI logic as graphs. For instance, a basic voice-to-voice…
2025 · inworld.ai · its alternatives →
- 21
- 22
MulmoChat▲88Modular Interface for visually interactive AI responses
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
- 24
Fast, accurate STT for production-grade voice agents
May 2026 · ringg.ai · its alternatives →
Also compare
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 →