A small gift for anyone building or studying foundation models.
Most "open" models hand you the weights and stop there. With Aether-7B-5Attn we wanted to hand over the whole thing β so you can actually learn from it, reproduce it, and build on it: the data recipe, the training code, every hyperparameter, the complete logs, and the intermediate checkpoints. All Apache-2.0, reproducible byte-for-byte.
What you can do with it: π Rebuild it from scratch, or fork the recipe for your own model π¬ Study a real heterogeneous-attention MoE β 49 layers place 5 attention mechanisms on a 7Γ7 Latin square, arranged as a clean, attributable ablation π Trace training dynamics across the released checkpoints (110k / 115k / 162k)
It's a modest 6.59B model, and an honest one β the limitations (no KV-cache in this build, small scale) are written right in the card. We're not claiming it's special. If any piece of it saves you time or teaches you something, that's exactly what we hoped for. π€
"Frontier models need a datacenter GPU" rests on a hidden assumption: that the model reads ALL its parameters every token. Decode is memory-bandwidth bound β sweep 34B params/token and an 8 GB card dies at 1β2 tok/s.
So we ran ONE 34.7B reasoning model β Ourbox-35B-JGOS, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts β as the identical weights across the whole hardware spectrum. All measured:
Why it works: Ourbox holds 34.7B params but only ~3B are active per token (256 experts, top-8). Since decode is bandwidth-bound, a dense 34B moves ~16.7 GB/token while Ourbox moves ~1.45 GB β ~11Γ less traffic. Put the experts in system RAM, keep attention/router/shared on the GPU, and a 34.7B reasoner runs on an 8 GB laptop β or no GPU at all.
Sparsity alone, proven (same laptop, same quant, ~same footprint): Ourbox-35B (A3B) 20.01 tok/s vs Qwen2.5-32B (dense) 5.36 β 3.7Γ from sparsity alone, ~2Γ the best dense-32B on any 8 GB machine. Not a toy: GPQA Diamond 86.4% (maj@8).
Try it live (same prompt, GPU vs GPU-less CPU, live tok/s). Honest scope: one machine's measurements; the CPU path proves it RUNS without a GPU, not that it beats one.
π We ran genuine quantum key-recovery on 'real IBM quantum hardware' β and pushed the frontier well past the largest hardware demos we're aware of (which sat at N=4).
Using Simon's algorithm on ibm_kingston, we recovered the secret key of two symmetric-cipher structures: β’ EvenβMansour β N=5 β N=10 β’ 3-round Feistel (DES-family) β block 6 β 8
Each verified against an 'independent control key', using error mitigation only (no QEC).
π§ Honest scope: this is not a quantum speedup (the effective difficulty tracks the classical birthday bound ~2^{n/2}), not a break of real AES/RSA, and not 16-round DES (ours is 3-round). The recovery method is reserved for a forthcoming paper; formal record status is pending peer review.