intelligence AI model so small it fits on consumer hardware

Prism ML Inc. announced Thursday the launch of Bonsai 2 27B , the second generation of its ultra-compact multimodal generative artificial intelligence small enough to fit on PCs and some high-end mobile devices.

The company said it used ternary , which uses three parts, to scale down its Qwen3.8 27B-based model. Qwen3.8 weighs in at about 56 gigabytes at its full 16-bit uncompressed size, and Bonsai 2 reduces it to about 5.9 gigabytes while retaining around 98.2% of its capabilities.

Although it is possible to shrink AI models using other compression techniques called quantization, these methods usually strip away accuracy, knowledge and other systematic capabilities. Qwen3.8’s minimal memory footprint is 9.4 gigabytes.