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title: README
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## Serving LLMs well is two problems
**Which model should answer this request?** and **how cheaply can that model
run?** Most teams solve neither โ they pin one frontier model to every route and
pay frontier prices on the easy majority of their traffic.
We build the two pieces that fix that.
|
### ๐ Route
A small, fast model that reads the prompt **before** you spend anything on it,
then ranks which LLM is actually worth calling. Runs on CPU next to your API
server โ no GPU, no PyTorch, no extra service to operate.
|
### ๐๏ธ Compress
Mixed-precision quantization that shrinks a checkpoint and speeds up serving
**without quietly trading away accuracy** โ and that still loads on the GPUs you
already have, not just the newest ones.
|
---
## Out now: nine open-weight builds
Weights-only mixed precision, `compressed-tensors`, stock `vllm serve`. Every
figure above is on the model's own card, next to the run that produced it.
**One protocol for everything we publish.** 1,370 items across fourteen public
benchmarks โ a 1,170-item knowledge suite over nine of them and a 200-item
tool-calling suite over five more, scored as calls and abstentions separately and
never blended. Same decode settings for every model, same 16k budget, thinking
on. Tool-calling figures are means of repeated runs, because a single run of that
suite can move three points on the same weights.
* ๐ **[Qwen3.8-Flash-Next โ mixed NVFP4/FP8](https://huggingface.co/primitive-ai/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-mixed-NVFP4-FP8)**
ยท A **180 B model on one 96 GB GPU**. 360 GB in BF16, two data-center cards in
FP8 โ this serves on one, with the 51 B n-gram table offloaded to host RAM and
no patched runtime. Our highest score anywhere: **90.3 overall, 92.2 knowledge**.
The [plain NVFP4 build](https://huggingface.co/primitive-ai/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-NVFP4)
is the same deployment; this one puts the attention and GDN projections at FP8
and is **13% faster single-stream** for an accuracy tie.
* ๐งฎ **[Qwen3.8-27B โ mixed NVFP4/FP8](https://huggingface.co/primitive-ai/Qwen3.8-27B-mixed-NVFP4-FP8)**
ยท 20.7 GiB, **2.5ร smaller than BF16** and 28% smaller than Qwen's own FP8.
The **shortest answers of any build we measured** (651 tokens) and the highest
completion rate. **Loads on an A100**, not just Blackwell โ the BF16 `lm_head`
is what keeps that path open โ and the MTP head survives, so speculative
decoding still works.
* ๐ฆ
**[Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B โ mixed NVFP4/FP8](https://huggingface.co/primitive-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-mixed-NVFP4-FP8)**
ยท A 35 B MoE vision-language model at 22.6 GiB, **3.0ร smaller than BF16**, and
**the best knowledge score in the lineup at 91.7**. Tool calling is its weak
axis, which is why it has a sibling โ
* ๐ ๏ธ **[Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B โ agentic](https://huggingface.co/primitive-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-agentic-NVFP4-FP8)**
ยท Same model, same size, calibrated for tool use. Level with BF16 on tool
calling and **2.8ร steadier run to run** (sd 1.3 against 3.1). We do *not*
claim it is more accurate at tool calling than the general build โ that gap
does not survive the noise. What reproduces is the consistency.
* โก **[Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B โ mixed INT4/INT8](https://huggingface.co/primitive-ai/Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-mixed-INT4-INT8)**
ยท A MoE+Mamba hybrid at 19.2 GiB and 5.01 bits/weight, **3.3ร smaller than
BF16 at 2.7ร its throughput**, and **8.6% smaller and ~7.7% faster than
nvidia's own NVFP4**. The strongest tool-calling profile here โ 85.4 on calls
and 70.5 on abstentions, the best balance of the two in the lineup.
* ๐๏ธ **[Muse-Glimmer-30B โ mixed NVFP4](https://huggingface.co/primitive-ai/Muse-Glimmer-30B-mixed-NVFP4)**
ยท A vision-language model at 20.4 GiB, the smallest of its field, tied with
BF16 on knowledge. **The vision tower stays BF16** โ a VLM loses its visual
grounding before it loses its words.
* ๐ชถ **[Laguna-XS-2.1 โ mixed NVFP4/MXFP8](https://huggingface.co/primitive-ai/Laguna-XS-2.1-mixed-NVFP4-MXFP8)**
ยท 19.3 GiB at 4.96 bits/weight, **3.2ร smaller than BF16 and smaller than every
official quant** โ and **2 points of pooled score ahead of the official NVFP4**,
almost all of it in the tool-calling half.
* ๐ **[Laguna-S-2.1 โ mixed NVFP4/MXFP8](https://huggingface.co/primitive-ai/Laguna-S-2.1-mixed-NVFP4-MXFP8)**
ยท 219 GB of source weights down to 64 GiB at 4.67 bits/weight โ **it serves
from one 96 GiB GPU**, the smallest of the 4-bit field, and **the best
abstention score of anything we publish (81.0)**: the one that knows when
*not* to call a tool.
* ๐งฐ **[Qwen3.8-Flash-Next โ quantized PLE tables](https://huggingface.co/primitive-ai/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-PLE-quant)**
ยท Not a checkpoint โ the 51.2 B-parameter n-gram tables that Flash-Next offloads,
quantized from 95.4 GB to **28.8 GB** and served memory-mapped from disk.
Validated end to end in a **48 GB container**, so a 64 GB-RAM host can serve
the 180 B model.
**Read the halves, not just the pooled score.** `overall` weights tool calling at
14.6% because that is what item count says โ which shrinks a tool-calling-only
divergence to a seventh of its size. Ornith leads the lineup on knowledge and
sits near the bottom on calls; Laguna-S is second from last overall and best of
all on abstentions. Abstention is the weak axis on every model anyone has
measured, ours included, so a build can look strong on one number and still
over-call in an agent.
## Still in private beta
The router is not published yet. We're working with a small number of teams
running real production traffic โ the ones who can tell us where the sharp edges
are before everyone else finds them.
**A good fit if you're:** paying per-token to a frontier API on traffic you
suspect doesn't need it, serving an open-weights model at meaningful volume, or
squeezing a large checkpoint onto GPUs you already own.
Request access at primitive.com โ
---
## How we publish
* **Numbers or nothing.** Every figure on our model cards comes from a held-out
suite and is reproducible from files in the repo. Where a metric is relative,
we say what it's relative to.
* **We document what breaks.** Our cards carry the failure modes, not just the
wins โ the dtype choices that matter, the upstream quirks that bite, and the
optimisations we tried and *rejected*.
* **No silent quality loss.** A compression or routing win that changes answers
isn't a win. When a cheaper option moved outputs too much, we don't ship it โ
and we say so on the card.
* **A tie is a tie.** Our accuracy deltas sit inside the run-to-run spread of the
suite, and we label them as ties rather than dressing them up as wins.
* **Runs on hardware you have.** Older-generation GPU fallbacks for the quants,
CPU-only for the router. Nothing here assumes you just bought the newest rack.
---
## Repositories
| repo | what it does | status |
|---|---|---|
| `Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-mixed-NVFP4-FP8` | 180 B MoE on one 96 GB GPU, FP8 attention + GDN projections. Our highest-scoring build. | **Open weights** |
| `Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-NVFP4` | The same single-GPU deployment, plain NVFP4. | **Open weights** |
| `Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-PLE-quant` | The 51.2 B n-gram tables quantized to 28.8 GB, mmapped from disk. Not a checkpoint. | **Open weights** |
| `Qwen3.8-27B-mixed-NVFP4-FP8` | Mixed-precision quant of Qwen3.8-27B. vLLM-native, A100 fallback, MTP head preserved. | **Open weights** |
| `Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-mixed-NVFP4-FP8` | Mixed-precision quant of Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B, a 35 B MoE VLM. Best knowledge score here. | **Open weights** |
| `Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-agentic-NVFP4-FP8` | Same model calibrated for tool use โ 2.8ร steadier run to run. | **Open weights** |
| `Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-mixed-INT4-INT8` | INT4/INT8 quant of nvidia's MoE+Mamba hybrid. Smaller and faster than the official NVFP4. | **Open weights** |
| `Muse-Glimmer-30B-mixed-NVFP4` | NVFP4 quant of the Muse-Glimmer-30B VLM, GPTQ-calibrated. Vision tower left at BF16. | **Open weights** |
| `Laguna-XS-2.1-mixed-NVFP4-MXFP8` | Mixed-precision quant of poolside's Laguna-XS-2.1. Smallest build of it we've measured. | **Open weights** |
| `Laguna-S-2.1-mixed-NVFP4-MXFP8` | Mixed-precision quant of poolside's Laguna-S-2.1. 219 GB of weights onto a single 96 GiB card. | **Open weights** |
| `llm-router-lite-80m-onnx` | CPU-only router: reads a chat `messages` array, ranks which LLM to call. ONNX, no torch or transformers. | Private beta |
Published weights carry their upstream licence โ Apache-2.0 for the Qwen3.8-27B
and Muse-Glimmer builds, Qwen Community 1.0 for the Flash-Next builds,
OpenMDW-1.1 for the Laguna and Nemotron builds, MIT for both Ornith builds, and
Apache-2.0 for the PLE tables. Derivative models carry upstream attribution and a
`NOTICE` or `LICENSE` file.
---
Cutting your inference bill?
We'd like to hear what you're serving and where it hurts.
primitive.com

primitive ยท inference economics for production LLM systems