Kolibri-1 MLX 8-bit

This is a native mere.run Swift/MLX artifact for Aleph Alpha's Kolibri-1. It contains 83.65 GB of logical tensor storage and is the candidate for a 128 GB Apple Silicon machine. Full-checkpoint Apple memory fit and throughput remain unverified. It requires a development build with the native Kolibri runtime (source snapshot 8bfa3f5d6d9f23097cd1446935acc4589ce6fa72).

Quantization and source

The source is Aleph-Alpha/Kolibri-1-BF16 at 7a8f290e7858825c3cf5e4c447ba68345de9f1d3. Routed experts, attention, and shared-expert projections use MLX affine 8-bit/group-64 weights. Embeddings, learned norms, routers, and the vocabulary head retain source precision. Router correction biases are converted losslessly to FP32; routing and logits compute in FP32. No retraining or instruction fine-tuning occurred.

Expert banks are stacked in numeric order, and config.json records every projection's policy. Use the native mere.run Kolibri loader. This custom layout is not a generic mlx-lm or Transformers checkpoint and is not the upstream vLLM tensor layout.

Measured diagnostic

Paired native BF16 and quantized scoring ran on a Runpod NVIDIA B200 with the same token sequences, score boundaries, and teacher-forced continuations. The suite contains 16 cases, including 3 calibration cases and 13 heldout cases. The heldout split has only 198 target tokens; it is a small diagnostic rather than a general capability benchmark. Q8 was measured as a larger-budget control separately from the selection between baseline and fitted mixed 2-bit.

Overall, English, and German diagnostic gates passed independently. Peak MLX allocation excludes other process/system memory and does not prove Apple memory fit. All diagnostic cases disable thinking; reasoning quality and large-context quality remain unmeasured here.

KOLIBRI_NATIVE_DIAGNOSTIC.json contains source/binary hashes, exact sequences, conversion manifests, fitting statistics, and per-case results for all variants. KOLIBRI_QUALIFICATION.json binds this artifact to its scoring receipt. The conversion manifest retains quality_qualified: false; public availability does not establish general accuracy or register a managed mere.run download.

Run

Download this repository, then pass the local directory to a mere.run build containing the native Kolibri runtime:

hf download Sawfwair/Kolibri-1-MLX-8bit --local-dir ./Kolibri-1-MLX-8bit

mere.run text chat --model ./Kolibri-1-MLX-8bit \
  --prompt "Explain why the sky is blue." --context-size 8192 --max-tokens 256

mere.run api serve --engine text-chat-kolibri \
  --model ./Kolibri-1-MLX-8bit --context-size 8192

The runtime uses the source tokenizer/chat template, supports tool messages and opt-in token logprobs, and defaults native chat to an 8,192-token budget. The 262,144-token limit in the pinned configuration is not a memory-fit claim. LoRA, constrained JSON, KV quantization, prefix reuse, and continuous batching are not implemented for this family.

License and provenance

Apache 2.0; see LICENSE, MODIFICATIONS.md, and UPSTREAM_MODEL_CARD.md. Aleph Alpha's upstream model card describes the original model's intended use, training, and limitations. KOLIBRI_CONVERSION.json records pinned source and output-shard SHA-256 values; SHA256SUMS covers the published bundle.