Soup CLI
Fine-tune an 8B LLM on a 4 GB laptop GPU
What it does
LoRA keeps the base model frozen: read, never written. So Soup keeps it in system RAM and streams it into the GPU one decoder layer at a time. Peak VRAM becomes one layer instead of the whole model. Measured on an RTX 3050 Laptop 4 GB: Llama-3.1-8B trains at 119.6 tok/s in 3.32 GB peak. One YAML, one command. SFT, DPO, GRPO, KTO, plus eval, gating and export. Apache-2.0. Every number is published, including the ones I measured and threw away.
Fine-tune Llama-3.1-8B on a 4 GB laptop GPU, and align on the same card. Soup is at v0.73.3, and the v0.73 line came out of three days on somebody else's hardware: every number this project had published came from one 4 GB RTX 3050 Laptop, and a borrowed 8x H100 box was the first machine able to hold a resident reference for a model worth streaming. It confirmed the method (the streamed forward pa
The whole post-training stack in one CLI. Soup doctors your data pre-flight, picks the method, writes the config (task, quantization, LR and epochs come from rules, not a search), derives evals from your own data, gates every save, and self-corrects reward hacking mid-run instead of just halting. And when the model is bigger than the card, one opt-in config key streams the frozen base from RAM or NVMe one layer at a time and quantizes it to 4-bit (BETA), so Llama-3.1-8B fine-tunes on a 4 GB GPU , and DPO, ORPO, SimPO and KTO stream too. 23 methods · 144 recipes · 17 quant formats · MLX + Apple adapter . The full AI workbench built on top of Soup: playground, data, evals, fine-tuning, deploy…from trysoup.dev
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Built a simple web app that tells you which open-source LLMs will work on your hardware. It auto-detects your specs, shows compatible models from Hugging Face, gives realistic performance estimates (tokens/sec), and recommends quantization settings. You can also manually input specs to see "what if I upgraded my RAM?" Made this after wasting time downloading giant models only to find they crawled on my hardware. Hope it saves you some frustration!
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