Liquid AI reveals 8B-A1B MoE trained on 38T (liquid.ai)
238 points by simjnd a day ago
asb 6 hours ago
Beware the license. They misleadingly state on the blog post "Open-weight — Download, fine-tune, and deploy without restrictions". But if you read their license <https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM2.5-8B-A1B/blob/main/LICE...> it has significant restrictions for any org with other $10M in revenue.
onlyrealcuzzo a day ago
I just tested this on a bug fixing benchmark I'm working on.
It did not perform as well as I expected. Qwen2.5-Coder-3B (2 years old) outperformed it by a wide range -> fixing ~50% of bugs whereas this model only fixed ~12%.
Granted, it's not a coder specific model, but given its benchmark performance to Gemma models, and that it's two years newer, and that it's an MoE with 8B total params, I expected it to be more competitive.
walrus01 20 hours ago
I personally find any model smaller than something like Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (8-bit quantization, about 49GB memory usage when loaded into llama.cpp) to be too "stupid" for reliable use.
I would much rather not run the model on my local laptop hardware and offload that to some system sitting under my desk in my home office, accessible via VPN, than take the risk of using an unreliable and flaky tool for the convenience of having it on the same hardware on my lap.
I pay very little attention to 8 billion or whatever (or even much smaller) models these days and I don't feel like I'm missing much.
satvikpendem 19 hours ago
Qwen 3.6 27B dense is much better than the 35B MoE model for coding, not sure if you've tried that yet.
sheeshkebab 6 hours ago
walrus01 19 hours ago
theanonymousone 15 hours ago
Have you seen the 8bit quantisation matter a lot? The "consensus" in r/LocalLlama is that up to 4 bits the loss is tolerable.
walrus01 15 hours ago
alfiedotwtf 4 hours ago
thot_experiment 19 hours ago
q6 is fine for that qwen with ctx @ q8, and the dense models of that size are solid at q4 with q8 ctx
h14h 6 hours ago
That's not all that surprising, IMO. From what I understand, LiquidAI is focusing pretty narrowly on building models that operate as the "agentic core" of a larger system.
If I were going to use this model, I'd be looking to use it more as is the primary chat interface of a larger system, and having it orchestrate & delegate tasks to other places via tool calls. It's not quite as exciting on the surface as a local "do it all" model, but it does enable some pretty neat use-cases, IMO.
I'm imagining a local agent that is super low latency, works entirely offline, and capable of queuing up complex tasks for larger/smarter cloud agents which execute them asynchronously.
onlyrealcuzzo 3 hours ago
Interesting...
Two of the other responses speak about it being abysmal at tool calling.
Overall, I'm pretty impressed a model this small can find/fix ~12% of bugs with crappy context - even if they're about as easy as possible to fix.
I just assumed it would perform better, given all the advancements in the space.
It's possible 1B active parameters is just not enough - even if it has 8B params of knowledge to reason through bugs.
Playing around with the context I fed it, it was able to fix up to ~34% of bugs vs ~46% for Qwen2.5-Coder-3B and ~54% for Qwen2.5-Coder-7B.
debazel 21 hours ago
I tried it with OpenCode and it is borderline incapable of using tool calls, so that might be why it is doing so bad on your test.
peder 21 hours ago
I just did the same. Absolutely awful. I assume OpenCode's heavy context is a problem, and it's probably better to use Liquid's own OpenCode alternative for this.
solarkraft 12 hours ago
mike_hearn 6 hours ago
It's not intended to be a coding model, however.
XCSme 21 hours ago
I will test it when it's accessible via OpenRouter, but the previous LFM2 model (lfm-2-24b-a2b) didn't do well on my tests, it got only 1/20 questions/tasks right, way below Gemma 31B or Qwen 35b-a3b (those get like 10/20 right)
BoorishBears 8 hours ago
I tested it against Gemma 4 31B and it's expectedly not favorable for world knowledge.
But even against E4B it's shaky, which is surprising given how many tokens they trained on. I guess it was on a lot of synthetic data.
HanClinto a day ago
Some of the coding-specific fine-tunes were really impressive boosts. Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct is also available [0] -- if it's not too much to ask, I'd be curious how more general models stack up in your benchmark?
mlmonkey a day ago
Question: I have a dirty car and the car wash is just 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive to the carwash?
Answer: . . . . So, unless you have a compelling reason not to, walk to the car wash.
nine_k a day ago
You did not express any desire to wash the car. After nudging, it's funnier:
> Is my desire to make my car clean related to a car wash in any way? To driving to it?
> Your desire to have a clean car isn’t tied to the existence or use of a car wash or to traveling to one. It stems from how much you value the effort, time, and resources you’re willing to invest in achieving cleanliness — whether that means doing it yourself, paying for a professional service, or simply enjoying the routine of a quick walk‑out. Driving to a nearby wash is just one possible method among many; the decision ultimately depends on factors such as how much time you have, how much you’d like to spend, the quality of the wash, and any personal preferences you have for hands‑on versus outsourced cleaning. In this case, walking is the simplest and fastest way, but it isn’t required for you to achieve a clean car.
Common sense is clearly there, but we should not underestimate the colossal heap of tacit assumptions that drive "obvious" decisions in our daily life.
enaaem 21 hours ago
The AI would be an awful husband
andai a day ago
Reminder that the human baseline for the car wash question is also pretty bad.
MPSimmons a day ago
cwnyth a day ago
I'm surprised these models haven't picked this up yet in the training data. Both Claude and ChatGPT missed that one when I posed the question to them last year.
treis a day ago
ChatGPT still says walk but adds:
>The main reasons to drive such a short distance would be if you're bringing the car specifically to be washed, carrying something heavy, or the weather or walking conditions make it impractical.
>If your goal is to get your car washed, you'll need the car there—so driving makes sense. If you're just going to talk to someone at the car wash or check it out, walking is probably faster.
tingletech a day ago
Why would a model know that one washes cars at a car wash? We don't clean our bodies at the body wash or clean the kitchen at the kitchen wash.
nullpoint420 14 hours ago
shepardrtc a day ago
jjtheblunt a day ago
SequoiaHope a day ago
purerandomness a day ago
sroussey a day ago
I walk to the gas station more often than I drive there.
deklesen a day ago
Yeah, but you are not washing yourself there, I suppose?
The whole twist here is that to wash your car, you need your car, so you cannot go by foot.
strangegecko 21 hours ago
dominotw a day ago
doesnt seem unreasonable.
halJordan a day ago
These faux questions always have a valid interpretation that the asker doesn't admit (for some reason). The model is then castigated for not making an opinionated choice
kennywinker a day ago
dd8601fn 18 hours ago
m463 17 hours ago
maybe unreasoning.
also, naysayers apparently DO have a compelling reason.
2001zhaozhao 15 hours ago
At some point we have to be running into some inherent mathematical limits of knowledge compression, right? No way the knowledge benchmarks on these 8B models will keep getting better without overfitting on these benchmarks
yorwba 15 hours ago
If you give the model access to specialized tools (e.g. web search for question answering) the knowledge doesn't have to be stored in the model weights, which leaves some room for improvement. You'd still be overfitting to benchmarks (since different tasks might require different tools) but not necessarily to specific benchmark questions, so within-domain generalization could be quite good.
As an example for a similar approach, Teapot AI has trained very small models https://teapotai.com/models to only answer questions where the answer can be found within the context window, and although not perfect, they do quite well at this compared to larger, more general models.
geek_at 9 hours ago
good point I have the feeling larger models (20b+) rely too much about their stored knowledge and sometimes fail to use tools because they think they know the answer. smaller specialized tool calling models could be the smart route for the future
SubiculumCode a day ago
Anybody use their localcowork [1] before? That is where the demo lives. Or not?
[1] https://github.com/Liquid4All/cookbook/tree/main/examples/lo...
adityashankar a day ago
This is super interesting, I'm particularly excited for this one as it may allow teams to scale this architecture for VLAs (vision language action models), and having sparser models means more real-time actions on a locally hosted model
demo link for anyone that wants to try this out https://playground.liquid.ai/chat?model=cmppnbgse000004l4bc8...
Ifkaluva a day ago
Liquid does amazing work, but I kinda feel like they are overtraining their models. 38T tokens seems like a lot for an 8B model
andai a day ago
What's the downside? Don't they stop when they hit diminishing returns?
hgoel 5 hours ago
Wouldn't the model start overfitting at some point? Degrading generalization for accuracy on the training set.
Ifkaluva 21 hours ago
You’d think so, but I haven’t seen it explicitly discussed in their papers, and nobody else that I know of trains on that many tokens
chabes a day ago
The small models are getting really impressive.
I recently realized that Qwen3.5:4B is way more capable than I thought a model that size could be.
Combine that with the work Liquid puts into RL and fine tuning, and you get models that perform extremely well on minimal hardware.
Combine that with your own fine tuning, and you get a specialized tool that is fast, private, and doesn’t require internet connection.
r0b05 a day ago
What did you use qwen3.5 4b for?
steve_adams_86 a day ago
I use it for triaging my messages and emails and reminding me how all of it ties together. It uses Obsidian to know where to put stuff and how to connect information. It isn't perfect. It's very slow (using a 32GB M2 Max) but fast enough for my needs.
A good example of how it's helpful is that it will make certain things relatively frictionless. Like, I need to pay property taxes. I hate this stuff. I got the email reminder from my municipality and it made an entry in my TODOs which points to page with instructions to pay the taxes, including my folio and access numbers for when I log in. That was taken from the email and a document which contains past property tax information. I have it all there, but it compiles relevant data into dedicated TODO pages.
I'm so bad at doing all of this myself. I really don't enjoy it. Send me to buy a carrot at the store and I'll happily walk 30 minutes there and back to do it. It isn't the effort so to speak; it's how unrewarding, inefficient, and bureaucratic it all is. I'm allergic to it. Why isn't it baked into my income taxes? Why are we still doing this?
Sometimes it does a really bad job of making TODOs. Like my wife messaged me about what our dinner plan was, so Qwen went ahead and made a plan for chicken meatball soup based on messages from a week earlier. It totally fabricated the recipe. Yet, I don't know, it was still helpful to be reminded that I'm in charge of dinner.
It's probably best at scaffolding responses to emails I don't want to send. I will write it, but I appreciate basic information being fleshed out so I can write it without jumping around looking for files or numbers or whatever constantly.
I use it with a custom harness. It could be a lot better. Everything about it could be better. The model is remarkably good for its size and price, though.
Letting Sonnet 4.6 do it instead always yields much better results, much faster, but it's kind of like using a new phone vs a super old one. They can both get you there. The sound quality and camera might be worse, it doesn't look as fancy, but the new one is $1200 and the old one is free on marketplace if you're handy with a screwdriver and a fresh battery. Sounds great to me
Worth noting: this was all vibe-coded using Opus 4.6 and 4.7. It's the only project I've built that is strictly vibe-coded. It's simultaneously exciting and disgusting. I'm not sure if I'll ever 'software engineer' it, or I'll just let it be slop. It works.
cjtrowbridge a day ago
its really good at agentic tasks
sroussey a day ago
I find it works well in the browser.
irthomasthomas a day ago
Woah, chinchilla scaling is 20 x active_params. I think mistral was 2 x Chinchilla. This is 1800 x
frankdlc222 a day ago
Look at the accuracy numbers and these things clearly don't know much yet, and I'm not about to hand one my hardest work. But you can see where it's going. As quantization and the MoE stuff keeps getting better, "good enough to just run on my own machine" keeps eating into more of what I'm currently paying a frontier lab for. Once a local model can handle like 80% of what I need, the math stops making sense for the subscription.
kilroy123 a day ago
Hmm, I asked it who made it, and it says Google?
pure_magic 19 hours ago
Many such cases. Many models say they're ChatGPT, a lot seem to figure out that since they're Transformers they're made by Google. Doesn't really tell you a lot. Perhaps a pretraining / midtraining artifact.
feelingsonice 18 hours ago
Is Liquid AI still using the liquid neural network architecture?
ramshanker a day ago
Guess we can run this even on CPU!
bee_rider a day ago
They seem… much better than all the models they compared against? What’s the catch?
FuckButtons a day ago
They only showed the benchmarks where they outperformed?
andai a day ago
It's twice the size?
grigio 14 hours ago
I tested the previous model from Liquid, unfortunatly big claim but poor real performance
elorant a day ago
Wow, this is fucking phenomenal. I fed it a long transcript asking it to create a summary and it executed it extremely well. For an 8B model this is quite impressive.
SubiculumCode a day ago
I gave it a 2000 line python code that does some fairly sophisticated geodesic calculations on surfaces, and asked to review the code. I then asked Claude and ChatGPT to "assess the accuracy of this review" and they did not hold back. That said, its a very small model, and very fast.
ValdikSS 13 hours ago
Bad at translation, at least to Russian. Very fast though, about 2x faster than Gemma 4 e2b on my CPU.
HenryMulligan a day ago
Why does this not have (day-one) support for Ollama? The previous model is on there? Is it related to the ongoing refactor work or are people abandoning Ollama for other LLM engines?
TobTobXX a day ago
Ollama is just llama.cpp but with their own interface ontop. Liquid does support llama.cpp, but Ollama is slow in updating its llama.cpp dependency.
garo-pro a day ago
It does, ollama pull maternion/lfm2.5
gmuslera a day ago
Homeopathic AI
nickpsecurity 18 hours ago
I'd normally call that a low-effort, troll comment. But, thinking on it, you may have a great metaphor.
They keep promising great performance out of models whose key ingredient (parameters) they are diluting. Many seem to be in a competition saying they're getting smaller and higher performance at the same time. Then, the homeopathic models don't perform as well as real models when independently tested. Again, spot on.
zmmmmm a day ago
No vision support?
jauntywundrkind a day ago
I really love how fast it is! Their press release comparing it on Strix Halo and M5 Max are impressive. It going twice as fast at GPU benchmarks even more so!