1-bit

PrismML, a Caltech-founded startup, has released Bonsai 8B, a 1-bit quantized large language model that the company claims is 14x smaller and 5x more energy efficient than full-precision counterparts while remaining competitive with standard 8B models. The model fits into 1.15GB of memory and uses a novel 1-bit weight representation (binary signs with shared scale factors per weight group) instead of traditional 16-bit or 32-bit precision.