Bonsai 2 27b - GoKawiil

PrismML shrinks Qwen3.8 27B model by 90% while keeping 98% of performance

PrismML, a startup founded by Caltech researchers led by CEO Babak Hassibi, has released Bonsai 2 27B, a compressed version of Alibaba's open-source Qwen3.8 27B model that shrinks it from full size down to 5.9 GB. The compressed model retains about 98% of the original's benchmark performance, up from 95% in the prior Bonsai release, while being small enough to run on PCs and possibly high-end smartphones. The company has raised a $22.25 million seed round and counts Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica as an advisor.

techcrunch.com · 2026-09-17

Bonsai 2 27B compresses a 27B model to 5.9GB with 98.2% performance retained

A new ternary-quantized model, Ternary Bonsai 2 27B, has been released, built on Qwen3.8 27B and using {-1,0,+1} weights with FP16 group scaling to shrink the model to about 1.76 effective bits per weight and a 5.9GB footprint. Despite being over 9x smaller than its full-precision counterpart, it retains 98.2% of aggregate benchmark performance across reasoning, coding, vision and agentic tasks, and supports a 262K-token context window under an Apache 2.0 license.

prismml.com · 2026-09-17