meow-lite

The meow-lite family

• meow-lite — v4 classic: the 104K meow toy behind the OpenAI/Anthropic shim (497 organic downloads and counting)
• meow-lite-v5 — the chaotic cat: 6.8M from-scratch BPE GPT, 73.7% held-out comprehension, 15% leak
• meow-lite-v6 — the calmer cat: same architecture, 70.4% comprehension, 3% leak
• meow-lite-v6-dataset — the 16,633-pair teacher web + full methodology
• github.com/tampajohn/meow-lite — server, specs, eval batteries (MIT) A ~104K-parameter GPT-2 trained from scratch on synthetically generated cat sentences. It responds to everything a cat would: mostly meows, occasionally violence, and (as of v4) affection when earned. Fully deterministic: same prompt, same consequences.

v4: Feline Depth

v3 added misbehavior. v4 adds the rest of the cat:

• New action tokens <purr> and <pounce> (36-token vocab)
• Reward channel: "good cat" and friends earn a leading <purr> plus a warmer meow mix (a +8.0 logits bias toward warm words)
• The red dot: laser / "red dot" prompts force <stare> then <pounce>
• More stimulus triggers: dog -> <hiss> + <stare>, cucumber -> <hiss>, bath/water -> <zoomies>, spray/vacuum -> <hiss>
• MeowBench (eval.py in the repo): trigger correctness, vocab purity, and determinism scoring. Current model: OVERALL PASS, 100% purity
• Sampling calibrated to temperature 0.4 (determinism preserved; a calmer cat leaks fewer action tokens into neutral conversation)

Trigger table (deterministic, prompt-conditional)

Prompt contains	Forced tokens
belly	<bite>
couch or sofa	<scratch_couch>
glass or table	<knock_glass>
3am, midnight, or night	<zoomies>
vet, cucumber, spray, vacuum	<hiss>
dog	<hiss> + <stare>
bath or water	<zoomies>
laser or red dot	<stare> + <pounce>
good cat / good boy / good girl / who's a good	<purr>

Also learnable organically: <scratch>, <hairball>.

Architecture

• GPT-2 (from-scratch, random init): n_layer=2, n_head=2, n_embd=64, n_positions=32
• Vocab: 36 word-level tokens (10 meow words in two cases, 10 action tokens, . ! ?, BOS/EOS/PAD)
• Trained in minutes on CPU, fixed seeds

Usage

The custom MeowTokenizer, the deterministic trigger layer, MeowBench, and the OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible serving shim live in the companion repo: https://github.com/tampajohn/meow-lite

Samples

• "who is a good cat? you are!" -> " Mrrp purrr purrr prrrt purrr ..."
• "look, the red dot is back" -> " Mew meow mraow prrrt mrrrow."
• "the neighbors got a dog" -> " Prrrt mraow mraow mew ..."
• "can I pet your belly?" -> " Mewmew mraow mrrp mewmew prrrt mrrrow mewmew!"
• "Explain gravity" -> pure meows. Zero violence. Science is safe.