"NPUs are inference-only, you can't train on them." We built a counterexample: VKORE-46M-NPU, trained from scratch on a first-gen (2025) inference NPU, 32 chips, no pretrained weights. A 46M decoder-only model (RoPE · SwiGLU · RMSNorm · GQA), char-level, TinyStories.
📏 Why trust it: a falling-loss curve proves nothing. So we trained the same model under identical init, data, and schedule on the NPU and on a GPU reference. · Loss trajectories correlate at 0.99 · Throughput converged to a comparable level The NPU backward pass and optimizer updates do numerically the same work as the GPU, not an approximation that merely trends down.
🧩 One accelerator now covers pretraining · LoRA · inference · quantization. We call this layer VKORE: "CUDA for NPUs."
⚖️ Public: weights, model card, NPU-vs-GPU comparison. Private (patent-pending, paper to follow): the core training technique. 46M char-level is toy scale on purpose: it proves the training path, not model quality. Larger models and real data are next.
Feedback from folks working on custom autograd backends and low-precision training kernels on non-GPU accelerators is very welcome. 🙌
🏆 Darwin-27B-ZTC-v2 just took #1 on the System One Mosaic Benchmark (S1MB).
S1MB compares 102 models across 137 specialized benchmarks, in three task types: Noul (assess a condition), Choice (select an option), Score (rate on a scale). Ranking is by overall Borda score.
📊 Top of the board 🥇 Darwin ZTC v2 (FINAL-Bench) 89.58 🥈 OpenJev-27B 87.50 🥉 AutoJev-27B 87.07 4️⃣ Eikos 27B 85.43 5️⃣ Jev 1.13 85.05
🔎 Ranks 2 to 5 are all the JEV family (TypeSafe AI's System One model, from ex-OpenAI researchers). S1MB exists to compare these System One judges, so leading it is the headline.
⚙️ Why a zero-token judge wins here 🔹 It does not generate. It reads the input and typed questions and returns a calibrated distribution in a single forward pass. 🔹 Zero generated tokens, no decoding loop, so latency and cost stay low. 🔹 Holds up out of distribution too: General Noul 96.00, General Choice 99.34.
It is also #1 on the typed-decisions leaderboard (0.743, zero-shot). Same message from both: a deterministic, calibrated judge at one forward pass per call.
💻 Data-center AI, now on a laptop: POCKET-Darwin-180B
We're releasing a 4-bit GGUF build of Darwin-180B-RSI, #1 on seven official Hugging Face leaderboards (self-reported), that runs without a GPU.
📦 360 GB → 111 GB (4-bit GGUF, 4 files) 🖥️ No GPU: one server CPU (16 threads) at 18.4–21.0 tokens/s 💻 RTX 5060 laptop (8 GB VRAM) + 32 GB RAM: 4.17 tokens/s 🧊 128 GB mini PC: whole model in memory, no GPU needed 🎯 MMLU-Pro, 2,000 questions, paired: original 87.65% = 4-bit 87.65%
How? · Only ~3B of 180B parameters are active per token (10 of 512 experts) · llama.cpp streams just the needed experts from SSD, so 32 GB RAM is enough · Graft quantization: we took the proven Unsloth UD-Q4_K_XL base build and swapped in only the 300 tensors our RSI training changed (300/300 verified)
Under the hood is Model-level Recursive Self-Improvement. The model solves verifiable problems, keeps only its own solutions that check out as correct, and trains on them. No human-written solutions or reasoning traces.
Built for teams that can't send data to an external cloud (defense, finance, public sector) to run a top-tier model fully offline.