glublm 0.2.0

An 18M-parameter goldfish language model with a 10-second memory

GlubLM

the language model that already forgot this sentence

GlubLM is an 18M-parameter transformer that plays a goldfish with a 10-second memory. Inspired by GuppyLM and Ted Lasso's "be a goldfish" meditation on the happiest animal on earth, GlubLM has a hard 48-token context window - it literally cannot remember what was just said.

Unlike GuppyLM, GlubLM:

• uses modern transformer components: RoPE + SwiGLU + RMSNorm
• was trained on a 60K LLM-generated dataset produced by a team of four Claude agents, not hand-authored templates
• runs in your browser via quantized ONNX (~21 MB) - try the demo

Quick start

Browser

Open the demo. Everything runs client-side - no backend.

Python

pip install glublm
glublm chat \
  --ckpt /path/to/glublm_60k_15ep.pt \
  --tokenizer /path/to/tokenizer_60k.json \
  --prompt "hello"

Or download the model from HuggingFace:

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
ckpt = hf_hub_download("DenSec02/glublm-18m", "model.safetensors")
tok  = hf_hub_download("DenSec02/glublm-18m", "tokenizer.json")

Train from scratch

1. Clone this repo
2. pip install -e ".[dev,deploy]"
3. Generate the dataset (see docs/DATASET.md)
4. Train: glublm train --data data/glublm_60k.json --epochs 15 --batch-size 64 --lr 3e-4
5. See docs/TRAINING.md for details

Architecture

• ~18.4M parameters, 8 decoder-only transformer blocks
• hidden 448, 7 attention heads, SwiGLU FFN (896x2), RMSNorm
• RoPE position encoding
• Vocabulary: 5,120 BPE
• Max context: 48 tokens (hard cap - the physical 10-second memory)
• Test perplexity: 12.14

Details: docs/ARCHITECTURE.md

Comparison vs GuppyLM

See docs/COMPARISONS.md for the empirical comparison. Short version: GlubLM tests the hypothesis that modern ops help at sub-20M scale, which is something GuppyLM explicitly decided against.

Links

• HuggingFace model
• HuggingFace dataset
• HuggingFace Space
• Browser demo

Credits

• GuppyLM by Arman BD - the original tiny fish-persona model
• Ted Lasso - the "be a goldfish" philosophy
• Anthropic Claude - the multi-agent dataset generation team

License

AGPL-3.0 - see LICENSE.

Citation

@software{glublm_2026,
  author = {Sepede, Dennis},
  title = {GlubLM: an 18M goldfish language model with a 10-second memory},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://github.com/Den-Sec/glublm}
}