{
  "video_id": "reddit_1u0hy5p",
  "channel_slug": "LocalLLaMA",
  "channel_handle": "r/LocalLLaMA",
  "title": "Was BitNet a dead end? What happened to ternary LLMs?",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1u0hy5p/was_bitnet_a_dead_end_what_happened_to_ternary/",
  "external_url": null,
  "upload_date": "20260608",
  "published_at": "2026-06-08T19:22:33+00:00",
  "transcript": "They seemed so promising at one point but the biggest ternary model is still 2B. What happened? Why aren't the frontier open weights AI labs attempting to use them?\n\n\n\n--- Top Comments ---\n\n\n[39 upvotes] The biggest ternary model is 8b\nhttps://huggingface.co/prism-ml/Ternary-Bonsai-8B-gguf\n\nThe reason there are no bigger:\n- training is just as expensive as other models, you mostly get the speed up at inference from this type of model\n- unproven as of yet, so a gamble to put a lot of training resources into\n- no hardware acceleration for ternary matmul specifically, everything still runs fp16 as far as I'm aware, so it's just not that worth it yet.\n\nThat's why as far as I can tell from what I know. Maybe someone will train a bigger one, no technical reason it can't be done. I'd love to see a huge ternary model, it's interesting tech \n\n[35 upvotes] Unfortunately it seems like R&D labs without a dedicated marketing effort behind their models don't grab much attention.  Meritous models get ignored while astroturfing and news articles gather everyone's eyeballs.\n\n[28 upvotes] There was a recent release from PrismML, with up to 8B parameter ternary models, but it's not exactly SOTA: https://prismml.com/news/ternary-bonsai\n\nAlso 4B for image gen: https://prismml.com/news/bonsai-image-4b\n\n[12 upvotes] Bitnet comes with it's own challenges that need to be addressed.\nChallenges include how to Backroll trough a network only using 0 - 1 instead of a gradient. ",
  "transcript_chars": 1472,
  "ingested_at": "2026-06-09T01:30:04.748748+00:00",
  "source": "reddit",
  "yt_meta": {
    "score": 68,
    "upvote_ratio": 0.91,
    "num_comments": 33,
    "author": "3ntrope",
    "is_self": true
  }
}