zeekay 1536f4c14a Tell Zen 6 Flash from its own files, as Zen
The card gave three bit widths (1.72, 1.75, 1.58) and a 9.3x ratio
that no file bears out, called the full-precision projector 1.2 GB
where it is 931 MB, and used a llama.cpp draft flag that does not
exist.

The GGUF tensor table counts 26,895,998,464 weights, so the densely
packed file is 1.77 bits per weight and 9.0x smaller than FP16 and the
2-bit-slot file 2.14 and 7.5x, each stated beside its file. The copy
names Zen 6 Flash, credits Zoo Labs Foundation, and keeps the loader
string in the Architecture row and prism-ml's credit in License &
attribution. LICENSE is the Apache-2.0 text.
2026-09-30 01:59:04 -07:00

license, language, pipeline_tag, tags, base_model
license language pipeline_tag tags base_model
apache-2.0
en
zh
image-text-to-text
zen6
zen6-flash
zen
ternary
speculative-decoding
metal
apple-silicon
llama-cpp
prism-ml/Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-gguf
ProCreations/Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-DFlash2

Zen 6 Flash

The compact Zen 6 · ternary 27B · 1.77 bits per weight · reads images · fits a laptop

Hugging Face GitHub License

Zen 6 Flash is the ternary build of Zen 6, from Zen LM, the open model family of Zoo Labs Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit. It is chosen for the same two jobs as Zen 6, where the machine is small:

  • Agentic coding that runs on your own machine, in under 8 GB with its vision projector, on an Apple Silicon laptop or one GPU.
  • Marketing work, reading images and documents beside the brief.

Zen 6 and Zen 6 Flash are available now; Zen 7 is in research preview: request access. Zen 6 Flash answers on api.hanzo.ai as zen6-flash.

What the files are

Every weight is ternary, the embeddings and the LM head included. The language model holds 26,895,998,464 weights (read from the GGUF tensor table), so a file's bits per weight is its size in bits over that count, and its ratio to FP16 is 53.79 GB (the count × 2 bytes) over its size.

File Size Bits per weight Smaller than FP16
Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-PTQ1_0.gguf, densely packed 5.95 GB 1.77 9.0x
Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-PQ2_0.gguf, one trit per 2-bit slot, read by GPU and Metal kernels as is 7.21 GB 2.14 7.5x
Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-mmproj-Q8_0.gguf, vision projector 629 MB
Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-mmproj-BF16.gguf, vision projector, full precision 931 MB
Bonsai-2-27B-DFlash2-Q8_0.gguf, speculative drafter 2.06 GB
SHA256SUMS 66 KB
Context 262,144 tokens native; about three layers in four are linear attention
Inputs text and images
Architecture GGUF general.architecture: qwen35

Accuracy against full precision

Suite FP16 A conventional 2-bit build (IQ2_XXS) Zen 6 Flash (PQ2_0) Retained
Average of 14 reasoning tests 86.33 72.59 84.78 98.2%
Math (MathVision, GSM8K) 97.10 79.40 96.57 99.5%
Code (HumanEval, LiveCode) 90.20 74.80 89.42 99.1%
Tool calling and schema adherence 76.80 58.10 74.92 97.6%
Footprint 53.79 GB 8.8 GB 7.21 GB 86.6% smaller

Measured

  • Apple Silicon M4 / M5 Max (Metal): 47.2 tok/s decode alone, 92.4 tok/s with the drafter; 7.84 GB including the vision projector and a 32K cache.
  • DGX Spark (CUDA 13.3): 170.04 tok/s decode with the drafter at 54.2% draft acceptance; 32,768 tokens across 4 parallel slots in under 12 GB.

Serve it

llama.cpp, with the vision projector and the drafter:

llama-server \
  -m Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-PQ2_0.gguf \
  --mmproj Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-mmproj-Q8_0.gguf \
  -md Bonsai-2-27B-DFlash2-Q8_0.gguf \
  --spec-draft-n-max 3 \
  -c 32768 \
  --port 8080

On a Mac, one prompt:

llama-cli \
  -m Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-PQ2_0.gguf \
  --mmproj Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-mmproj-Q8_0.gguf \
  -p "<image>\nDescribe the system architecture shown in this diagram in detail."

Citation

@misc{zenlm2026zen6flash,
  title  = {Zen 6 Flash},
  author = {Zen LM},
  year   = {2026},
  publisher = {Zoo Labs Foundation}
}

License & attribution

Apache-2.0; see LICENSE. Zen 6 Flash is Ternary Bonsai 2 27B by prism-ml (prism-ml/Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-gguf, Apache-2.0), itself built from Qwen3.8-27B by the Qwen team (Apache-2.0), with the speculative drafter by ProCreations (ProCreations/Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-DFlash2).

S
Description
Zen6 Flash — 27B Ultra-Compact Ternary Vision-Language Model (PQ2_0, DFlash2, Metal & Unified Memory Native)
Readme Apache-2.0
34 KiB