LFM2.5-8B-A1B: hardware requirements

LFM2.5-8B-A1B needs about 5.9 GB of memory at Q4 quantization — a 5.2 GB download plus room for context and overhead. That fits a machine with 16GB RAM.

Parameters
8.5B
Tier
Runs on a laptop
Licence
lfm-open
Released
2026-01-06

This is a mixture-of-experts model. Only a fraction of its 8.5B parameters are used for each token, so it runs faster than its size suggests — but all of it still has to fit in memory. The speed is that of a small model; the memory requirement is that of a large one. More on this →

Will it run on your machine?

Download sizes by quantization

Lower quantization means a smaller file and less memory, at some cost to quality. Q4_K_M is the usual starting point. What is this?

QuantDownloadRAM @ 4KRAM @ 32KSource
Q4_K_Mrecommended5.2 GB5.9 GB7.3 GBmeasured
Q5_K_M6.0 GB6.8 GB8.2 GBmeasured
Q6_K7.0 GB7.9 GB9.3 GBmeasured
Q8_09.0 GB10 GB12 GBmeasured
BF1617 GB19 GB20 GBmeasured

“Measured” sizes are read from published GGUF files (LiquidAI/LFM2.5-8B-A1B-GGUF). “Estimated” sizes are derived from the parameter count and are typically within a few percent. The RAM columns add the context cache and runtime overhead to the download size.

Other sizes of LFM2.5