PrismML Launches Ternary Bonsai 1.58-Bit Models — Then Community Contests Claims vs Gemma 4

r/LocalLLaMA·medium signal

PrismML released Ternary Bonsai, a family of 1.58-bit ternary ({-1,0,+1}) language models in 8B, 4B, and 1.7B sizes under Apache 2.0. The 8B variant uses ~1.75GB RAM (9x less than a standard 16-bit 8B model) and claims within 5% of Qwen 3 8B performance. The announcement hit 331↑ (81 comments) on r/LocalLLaMA. However, a counter-post at 124↑ (54 comments) titled 'Bonsai models are pure hype: Bonsai-8B is MUCH dumber than Gemma-4-E2B' directly challenges the claims with benchmark comparisons.