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Torad Labs · Research Measured · re-runnable

Research is the product.

Open methods, re-runnable benchmarks, and the numbers behind every claim on this site.

Validated results come first. The blog and the drafts build on them.

Every number here is re-runnable.

Each result names the model it ran on and the method behind it. Open items live on /technology.

0.9998similarity vs bf16 original
31%of vLLM memory
238 tok/svs 267 on vLLM
5 / 5top answers matched

What we have measured

VALIDATED
What we claimWhat we measured
It needs about a third of the memory870 MB vs 2.7 GB (31%). Qwen3-1.7B linear weights, Torad Quant 4-bit, our own format. It stores each number using 4 bits instead of the usual 16, so the model takes about a third of the space in practice. against Short for bfloat16, the standard 16-bit format AI models normally run in. Accurate, but it takes a lot of memory..
It writes about as fast as the cloud software238 vs 267 How fast the model writes. A token is roughly a short word or a few letters, so this is close to words per second., within 10%. Qwen3-1.7B against The most popular open-source software for running large AI models. Fast, but it needs a lot of memory to load a model..
It runs models the cloud software cannot even fit40 and 21 tokens per second for Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B (8 and 14 billion The adjustable values inside a model. More parameters usually means a bigger, more capable, and more memory-hungry model. An "8B" model has 8 billion of them.) on an ordinary 16 GB graphics card, where vLLM cannot load them at all.
The shrunk model gives the same answers as the original0.9998 A score from 0 to 1.00 for how alike two answers are, called cosine similarity. 1.00 means identical. We use it to compare the shrunk model against the full-size original. on Qwen3-1.7B, top answer matching on 5 of 5 test prompts (The shrunk model gives the same answers as the full-size original, down to the same top choice.).
It works on other model families too0.9997 on 4 of 5 for Gemma 4 E2B, a different base model, the same way.
It takes very little code to run2,500 lines of Rust and 1,300 of CUDA, against roughly 500,000 in the standard stack.

Three preprints under way.

They land here as they finish.

  • A 4-bit model that can still learn ASSERTED in progress How we keep a shrunk 4-bit model trainable. Most methods freeze it for good. No one else has published this.
  • Running and training in one step ASSERTED in progress The megakernel: running a model and training it in one pass, instead of two separate programs.
  • Shrinking a model without losing it ASSERTED in progress How TQ4 climbs from the naive baseline (0.85) to the same answers as the original (0.9998). The full write-up of the result above.
V A

How claims are labeled.

VALIDATED means measured and re-runnable: a named model, a stated method, a number you can reproduce.

ASSERTED means believed but not yet proven, like the drafts above.