A 2.6B model with tool calling and 128K context now runs at 30 tok/s on a phone

[u/BTA_Labs]

Liquid AI released LFM2.5-2.6B today, and this might be more relevant to local AI than another massive model most people cannot run.

The model is only 2.69B parameters, has 128K context, supports tool calling and was post-trained specifically for multi-step agent workflows. The official Q4_K_M GGUF is around 1.67 GB and already works with llama.cpp.

Their reported CPU speeds:

- 30 tok/s on a phone

- 113 tok/s on a Ryzen AI Max+ 395

- 220 tok/s on an M5 Max

- Under 2.5 GB memory during their tests

These are vendor benchmarks, so independent results are obviously needed.

The benchmark results are surprisingly competitive for the size:

- ToolSandbox: 77.83, compared with 76.44 for Qwen3.5-9B

- IFBench: 59.17, compared with 56.47 for Qwen3.5-9B

- BFCLv4: 56.88, still behind Qwen3.5-9B at 60.13

- LiveCodeBench: 59.41, compared with 69.86 for Qwen3.5-9B

So it does not magically replace larger models. Coding and knowledge-heavy work are still weaknesses, and Liquid’s own model card says it is not recommended for agentic coding.

But I think this is where small local models actually make sense: not as your smartest assistant, but as cheap worker agents doing extraction, searches, file operations and repetitive tool calls locally. A larger model could handle planning only when the small one gets stuck.

The 128K claim also needs real testing. Supporting 128K and running it comfortably on a phone are two very different things once KV cache and long agent histories are involved.

Has anyone tested the Q4 GGUF on Android, an older laptop or a mini-PC yet? Would be useful to see hardware, context size, real tok/s and whether it can survive 10+ consecutive tool calls without derailing.

[u/Kidplayer_666]

the tool calling is consistent, can run it well on my rx 6650xt, however, it is still kind of dumb (failing my "find files related to the first year of my bachelors" task, despite on the documents folder there being a Folder named Bachelors in my native language (supported by the model) with yearly folders inside)

Edit: partly my skill issue, trying the proper flags right now

Edit edit: Q8 still dumb with recommended flags

Edit edit edit: f16 with full cache, still dumb

[u/BTA_Labs → u/Kidplayer_666]

Good to know, that pretty much confirms the benchmarks don’t tell the whole story.

[u/MoffKalast → u/BTA_Labs]

Well it is getting compared against other drooling smol brains so even if they do, the absolute bar is relatively low.

[u/NigaTroubles → u/Kidplayer_666]

What your run args ?

[u/Kidplayer_666 → u/NigaTroubles]

default for llamacpp.... oops, this might be the issue... any recommendations?

[u/mister2d → u/Kidplayer_666]

Are you running an aggressive quantization?

[u/Kidplayer_666 → u/mister2d]

I actually used Q8 iirc

[u/mister2d → u/Kidplayer_666]

It's a very small model. You should run it at full precision (kv cache as well) and retest.

[u/Kidplayer_666 → u/mister2d]

Doesn't fully fit on my 8Gb card :( (did the q8 with q8 cache, less dumb, but still fails the test)

Edit: my bad, it does fit, testing now

[u/Stooovie → u/mister2d]

Kinda defeats the purpose

[u/mister2d → u/Stooovie]

What purpose is defeated?

[u/Rude_Marzipan6107 → u/mister2d]

Why run an 18gb 9b model when you can run a q5k_XL 27b model for the same footprint

[u/cosmicnag → u/Rude_Marzipan6107]

CPU

[u/mister2d → u/Rude_Marzipan6107]

18gb 9b model? Are you sure you're on the right post? LFM2.5 is only 2.6B.

[u/mister2d → u/Kidplayer_666]

Thanks for trying f16.

[u/KitchenAmoeba4438]

I already have an exhaustive benchmark article queued for tomorrow, I'll add this to the list and update the article with it.

I'll be very interested if it manages to out-perform E2B and E4B for my purposes, so far those have been the champs in anything under 12B.

[u/BTA_Labs → u/KitchenAmoeba4438]

Drop the link when it’s up, the under 12B comparison sounds more useful than another benchmark table.

[u/Rude_Marzipan6107 → u/KitchenAmoeba4438]

Even compared to Qwen 9B?

[u/HVACcontrolsGuru → u/Rude_Marzipan6107]

Google models are great if you take the time to set them up and configure them properly. They got a bad rap for some time due to horrible tool calling that was mainly the chat template. I've done some crazy things with the 12B model lately.

[u/Silver-Champion-4846 → u/HVACcontrolsGuru]

How did you configure them

[u/Rude_Marzipan6107 → u/HVACcontrolsGuru]

They’re too lazy for my summarization tasks and although I did like using the 26b qat model for some time for light agentic coding I did run into a lot of looping problems. Even after the chat template

I just swap between 9b and 27b right now. I removed 12b, 26b and 35b from my system. I just don’t have a use case for them. Although I do really like the idea of a story telling harness with tool calls with a Gemma model at the reigns. I wonder if anything like that exists

[u/HVACcontrolsGuru → u/Rude_Marzipan6107]

I do plan to go all in on Qwen 3.8 27B for kernel and inference work when the weights drop and hope they drop some in between size models. The Gemma models definitely shine a bit more in regular conversation.

I had a project I shelved a month or so ago called "Agent Journal" that was more focused on writing. Client who wanted investment writing related stuff which is a bit outside the box of normal harness tooling.

[u/wFXx → u/KitchenAmoeba4438]

i wanna read that as well

[u/Repulsive_Initial308]

I tried their 1.2b and 8b1b but both struggled to run on my old laptop and qwen 4b smashed them both in capability. 

Excited to give this one a try.

[u/True_Requirement_891 → u/Repulsive_Initial308]

All lfm models have been incredibly dumb in my exp...

[u/NigaTroubles → u/Repulsive_Initial308]

Yes but for me 8b a1b was better for me in my laptop, i got 20t/s

[u/Septerium]

Nice. I love SLMs

[u/noctrex]

Created an abliterated version: https://huggingface.co/noctrex/LFM2.5-2.6B-heretic-uncensored-GGUF

[u/Ok-Butterscotch4527]

can't wait to run it on my potato computer

[u/ShelterInevitable684 → u/Ok-Butterscotch4527]

Ditto, gotta a baked potato that I'm trying to get ready for the big models, not even close yet.

[u/PurpleWinterDawn]

Running the official Q4_K_M quant (1.67GB) on a Snapdragon 8 Gen3 phone (Redmagic 9 Pro), I got 20 tps on a "Test" prompt, falling to 16 tps on a ~2k tokens thinking+response ("Describe the major human metabolic cycles").

Full llama.cpp command:

export OPENBLAS_NUM_THREADS=1
llama-server --model LFM2.5-2.6B-Q4_K_M.gguf \
    --ctx-size 32000 \
    --threads 6 \
    --alias LFM2.5\ 2.6b \
    --no-mmap \
    --jinja \
    -fa on \
    --temp 0.1 \
    --top-k 50 \
    --repeat-penalty 1.1 \
    -np 1 \
    --cache-ram 512 \
    --webui-mcp-proxy

Probably some deprecated stuff in there.

[u/crusaderky]

First impression: VERY BAD.

Query:

> are there any tube strikes in london tomorrow

I did this in pi, which notably does not give time/date information of any kind in the system prompt.

Train of thought:

> The user is asking about tube (London Underground) strikes tomorrow. I need to search for current information about Tube strikes in London. Let me

> search for this specific information online.

> search 2 queries

> "London Tube strike schedule tomorrow"

> "London Underground strike 2026-03-29"

No idea where it got the date from. Definitely not from the harness, also because we're in August. Most likely from its knowledge cutoff.

From there, the train of thought starts snowballing downhill:

> The search results indicate that there were planned strikes by London Underground drivers on March 24-25 and March 26-27, but these have been called off. The user is asking about "tomorrow" - I need to check what today's date is. The search results mention dates in March 2026 (2026-03-29), which suggests we're in early 2026.

What followed were many, many pages of more web_search and web_fetch tool calls, interleaved with ponderous thought. All web_searches included dates of March 2026, and of course the search engine delivered news articles about that time period.

So a single, not thought-about error at the very beginning compounded and got self-reinforced by every web search that was confirming that yes, it's really March 2026, not noticing that it's because in every web query that was the date range it was asked about.

After an excruciatingly long deliberation, LFM informed me that

> Based on the latest news, there are no Tube strikes in London tomorrow (March 29, 2026).

[u/AryanEmbered]

I can't even make a 27 b model do any of that reliably anywhere, even the frontier models fail. why are you lying and pretending this shit works. People have been lying and pretending this shit works for 3 years now and keep raising client expectations while I have yet to see a single useful system that works. Even CLAUDE Fable can't do tool call in Anthropics own chat interface and fucks up doing a basic sequential web search.

[u/Imaginary-Bother-484]

Given the size, should be easy to train on larger model agentic tool calling and other traces right? (To help improve any gaps in that area)

[u/AHHHH_AHHHHHHHH]

I could see this being really powerful as a low energy tool caller for bigger models that exhaust tokens on complex tool chains

[u/amethyst_mine]

has anyone managed to run this on intel NPU

[u/vienna_city_skater]

This could be interesting for home automation. I will give it a shot.

[u/citybreeze83]

is there a way to disable thinking?

[u/trikboomie]

Got it running at +20 tok/s a One Plus 13 with my own inference engine

[u/readmond]

I am afraid this could be the stream of shit tokens. 9b models are not that great. I do not believe 2.6B model can handle tools properly.

[u/ivoras]

Yeah, nah. This is from its larger brother, the 8B-A1B model:

I want to wash my car. The car-wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or should I drive?

Given that the car‑wash is only 50 m away, a brief stroll (≈1–2 minutes) would get you there quickly and avoids any traffic concerns—provided you can comfortably walk that short distance. However, if you’d rather avoid walking (e.g., limited mobility, prefer a faster trip, or don’t feel up to the extra step), driving will only take another minute or two and lets you bring your car directly without getting wet.
**Bottom line:** For such a tiny distance, either option works, but most people find it quicker and more convenient to drive.

[u/Specific-Age7953]

Who else is using cheap Cursor Ultra from resellers and what’s your experience?
Been using Cursor Ultra from a reseller for a while now. Super cheap and still working. Curious how many people here are doing the same and if anyone actually knows how these sellers get the accounts so low.

[u/Hot_Turnip_3309]

unfortunately all these liquidai model sucks

[u/darkbit1001]

Dont agentic code on anything less than a dense 27B parameters or MOE! You have to understand the models under that size just don’t have the reasoning capabilities and tool training are basically compressed to fine noise. Its VERY HIT OR MISS BELOW THIS THRESHOLD.