Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-GGUF

GGUF quantizations of KSP-NMAI/boris-1.3-125M-Instruct for llama.cpp and compatible runtimes (llama-server, LM Studio, koboldcpp, Jan).

The original safetensors weights live in the base repo — use those for finetuning or for any PyTorch-based runtime. GGUF is inference-only.

Which file should I pick?

Use Q8_0, or Q6_K if you want the same quality a little smaller.

Boris-1.3-125M is a small model, and quantization behaves differently at this scale than it does for 7B+ models. d_model is 768 and the QKV/FFN rows are 2304/3072, all divisible by 256, so unlike the 75M sibling every tensor here really is quantized at its nominal bit width — the k-quants and i-quants behave as intended.

What still sets a floor on file size is the token embedding: 768 × 50304 ≈ 38.6M weights, 31% of the model. The output weights are tied to it, and llama.cpp keeps it at Q6_K (~32 MB) in nearly every file here, which is most of the 50–60 MB you see at the bottom of the table.

The practical consequence is that the aggressive quants buy very little. Going from Q8_0 (130 MB) to IQ1_S (50 MB) saves 80 MB while more than tripling perplexity, and the ternary files are broken outright. Below roughly Q3_K_M the curve turns sharply and is not worth walking down unless you are curious.

Files

Perplexity is measured on a fixed 30 × 1024-token slice of the calibration corpus. It is useful for comparing these rows against each other and nothing else.

File	Quant	Size	PPL	Notes
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-F16.gguf	F16	241M	55.10	Reference. Unquantized conversion of the safetensors weights.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-BF16.gguf	BF16	241M	55.12	Reference, bfloat16.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q8_0.gguf	Q8_0	130M	55.08	Effectively lossless. Recommended.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q6_K.gguf	Q6_K	102M	55.16	Near-lossless.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q5_K_M.gguf	Q5_K_M	94M	55.61	Very good quality.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q5_K_S.gguf	Q5_K_S	91M	55.54
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q5_1.gguf	Q5_1	96M	55.51
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q5_0.gguf	Q5_0	91M	55.60
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q4_K_M.gguf	Q4_K_M	87M	56.05	Standard 4-bit default for larger models.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q4_K_S.gguf	Q4_K_S	82M	56.28
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q4_1.gguf	Q4_1	86M	56.80
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q4_0.gguf	Q4_0	81M	56.94
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-IQ4_NL.gguf	IQ4_NL	81M	56.22	Best of the 4-bit-and-under group per byte.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-IQ4_XS.gguf	IQ4_XS	78M	56.27
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q3_K_L.gguf	Q3_K_L	84M	57.61
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q3_K_M.gguf	Q3_K_M	78M	58.24	Reasonable floor for everyday use.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q3_K_S.gguf	Q3_K_S	70M	61.97
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-IQ3_M.gguf	IQ3_M	74M	58.07
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-IQ3_S.gguf	IQ3_S	70M	60.44
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-IQ3_XS.gguf	IQ3_XS	69M	61.27
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-IQ3_XXS.gguf	IQ3_XXS	62M	65.56
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q2_K.gguf	Q2_K	67M	68.54
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q2_K_S.gguf	Q2_K_S	62M	83.13	Starts looping on open-ended prompts.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-IQ2_M.gguf	IQ2_M	60M	68.66	Best 2-bit option; matches Q2_K 7M smaller.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-IQ2_S.gguf	IQ2_S	58M	74.79
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-IQ2_XS.gguf	IQ2_XS	55M	92.54	Fluent but confabulates freely.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-IQ2_XXS.gguf	IQ2_XXS	53M	107.47	Sometimes emits an empty answer.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-IQ1_M.gguf	IQ1_M	51M	153.38	Still clean English, but largely unrelated to the question.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-IQ1_S.gguf	IQ1_S	50M	179.37
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-TQ2_0.gguf	TQ2_0	56M	8903.62	Ternary; degenerate token soup. Curiosity only.
Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-TQ1_0.gguf	TQ1_0	52M	8903.62	Ternary; as above, and gives the same greedy output as TQ2_0.

All K-quant, IQ and TQ files were produced with an importance matrix calibrated on 300 chunks of held-out data drawn from the model's own pretraining mixture (60% fineweb-edu / 40% dclm) plus rendered instruction turns; the matrix itself is published here as boris-1.3-125m-instruct.imatrix. Q8_0 and the legacy Q4_0/Q4_1/Q5_0/Q5_1 are plain round-to-nearest. SHA256SUMS covers every file.

Converted and quantized with llama.cpp build b9013 (e48034dfc).

Usage

# straight from the Hub
llama-server -hf KSP-NMAI/Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-GGUF:Q8_0 --jinja

# or a local file
llama-server -m Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct-Q8_0.gguf --jinja

The chat template is embedded in every file, so --jinja applies the correct prompt format automatically.

Prompt format

Boris-1.3-125M-Instruct uses a plain text chat template — the GPT-NeoX-20B BPE has no chat special tokens, so turns are delimited by headers and terminated by <|endoftext|> (token 0), which is also the stop token.

### System:
{optional system message}

### User:
{your message}

### Assistant:
{reply}<|endoftext|>

### User:
{next message}

### Assistant:

Note this differs from the Alpaca-style template used by Boris-1.3-75M-Instruct; do not reuse prompts between the two.

Verification

Every file in this repo was checked to load as arch=gpt2 with the chat template present, and to complete chat-formatted prompts with output that decodes as strict UTF-8 containing zero U+FFFD replacement characters — no mojibake at any quant level, including the ternary files. The GGUF vocab was diffed against the source tokenizer.json across accented Latin, Cyrillic, CJK, Hangul, Arabic, Hebrew, emoji (including ZWJ sequences), zero-width and whitespace-run samples: identical token ids and byte-exact detokenization.

Limitations

This is a very small instruction-tuned model. It will produce text that is frequently inaccurate, inconsistent, or offensive, and has received no alignment or safety tuning beyond supervised fine-tuning. Do not rely on it for factual information or deploy it without supervision.

License

Apache 2.0. Copyright 2026 Joseph Jones. See the base repository for the full notice.