thread13/Ternary-Bonsai-2-9B-llamafile

About

• Note(1) 2026-10-26: Ternary-Bonsai-2-9B-Q2_0.llamafile uploaded as Ternary-Bonsai-2-9B-Q2_0.llamafile.exe, to simplify running it on Windows.
  • NB: It is not unlikely (see note(2) below) that Windows will do everything in its power to prevent one from running its binary; while it was made in good faith, please make your own judgement, run antivirus scans, try it in a VM first, etc etc -- the author ran the file on a few platforms before uploading, but takes no responsibility for any consequences of running this -- if it kills all your kittens, it's on you and please don't come back complaining.
• Note(2) 2026-10-26: apparently, VirusTotal does not like the llamafiles and marks them "suspicious". There's not much I can do there, I guess -- by the looks of it, it also slaps the same stamp on Mozilla AI' own llamafiles. So let us wait untill the other scanners try it; until then -- feel free to e.g. ClamAV scan them after download, and/or also feel free to redo it yourself and observe the same reaction from the scanners.
  • Also, a prevous test have shown that only one of all those 75 engines (named "SecureAge") marks this binary as "malicious", and its comment says "Acronis (Static ML)" -- whatever that means. Well, the binary does have an embedded LLM (which is like the whole point here), so may be this is what causes this misunderstanding.

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A llamafile is a universal (APE) single-file executable, which is based on llama.cpp-built binaries. It contains an embedded LLM model and can provide a console and/or a web interface to chat with it.

• "and/or" here has a literal meaning -- one can either run a console chat (--chat), or a web server (--server), or -- by default -- both.
• NB(1): by default the web server attempts to listen on all available interfaces -- run it as --host 127.0.0.1 to make it private to your system only!
  • (this does not seem to be the case anymore)
• NB(2): there's also a cli completion interface (--cli), if you wish -- check the docs!

How to use:

• https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile/blob/main/docs/running_llamafile.md
• https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile/blob/main/docs/quickstart.md

Building references:

• https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile/blob/main/docs/creating_llamafiles.md
• https://huggingface.co/prism-ml/Ternary-Bonsai-2-9B-gguf

Default arguments:

For example, one might want to try these:

• https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5

temperature=0.6, top_p=0.95, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=0.0, repetition_penalty=1.0

// recommended (unsloth) for coding in thinking mode:
--ctx-size 16384 --temp 0.6 --top-p 0.95  --top-k 20  --min-p 0.00 \
    --chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking":true}'

// recommended (unsloth) for reasoning tasks:
--ctx-size 16384 --temp 1.0  --top-p 0.95 --top-k 20  --min-p 0.00 \

To enable "thinking mode" (slower but better results):

• https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5#how-to-enable-or-disable-reasoning-and-thinking

--chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking":true}'

Extra recommendations -- try the following if generation falls into an endless loop:

• https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5 (same source)

presence_penalty = 0.0 to 2.0

Quirks:

• https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile/issues/373
• https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile/tree/0.9.0?tab=readme-ov-file#gotchas-and-troubleshooting

For some quirks and workarounds (like how to make this run on WSL), see the second link above; in particular, if you are seeing a message like this:

Cannot open assembly '...': File does not contain a valid CIL image.

The reason might be that you have wine installed and it tries to run the executable (and fails). There are workarounds available -- see above; one simple way to bypass this and make llamafiles work on a Unix system (e.g. Linux and/or MacOS X) is to run them as shell scripts (yes, they are shell scripts):

sh /path/to/llamafile -h # and if you can now see the help output, then likely it just worked )