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Low-Zi-Hong sliced a ~0.4B BitNet model across a cluster of seven ESP32S3 microcontrollers connected by daisy-chain SPI: master handles tokenization and embeddings, six compute nodes process four transformer layers each using 1.58-bit ternary weights from flash. It works. It is slow. It is the most literal possible demonstration of the BitNet "run anywhere" claim.
Read more →Two independent projects landed on Hacker News today pursuing the same idea from different directions: fit something genuinely useful into the smallest possible package. One runs a 28.9M-parameter LLM at 9.5 tok/s on an $8 ESP32-S3 by keeping the embedding table in flash. The other fits complete voice synthesis into 9.36M parameters that run faster than real-time on a laptop CPU. Neither is frontier work. Both are instructive about what constrained-environment AI actually requires.
Read more →PrismML launched Bonsai on March 31, claiming the first commercially viable true 1-bit LLMs: an 8B model that fits in 1.15 GB and runs at 131 tokens/sec on an M4 Pro. The key word is "true" — every layer, including embeddings and attention, is 1-bit, not just the weights in isolation.
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