Research Domain
Local Intelligence
Foundation models trained end-to-end on hardware the lab owns — M3 Max unified memory, custom Metal kernels, memory-mapped corpora — plus edge TTS on Raspberry Pi.
MEASUREDCURRENT EVIDENCE LEVEL
Research Question
How much frontier-style capability can be built with zero rented compute?
The D-CSIL-3 pipeline pretrains a 235M selective-state model on a 4.75B-token, seven-stage all-local corpus (FineWeb-Edu, Wikipedia, SlimPajama, OpenWebText, WikiText-103, SFT mix) at a measured 1,270 tokens/sec.
The mlx-recurrence kernel family exists because local training demanded it: fused Metal scans deliver up to 31.8× forward+backward speedups and were hot-swapped into a live run, cutting peak memory from 23.9GB to 10.3GB.
Experiments in this domain
- HELIX-200M-F35BHELIX-200M foundation trunk (helix-200m-foundation-35b)2026-07-06
- HELIX-BAKEOFF-0611Architecture bakeoff: rotation vs. nopulse vs. pulse HSL2026-06-11
- HELIX-56M-VS-TRANSFORMERHELIX-56M vs. a matched transformer: the first honest tax measurement2026-06-12
- HELIX-120M-FOUNDATIONHELIX-120M foundation run, the in-sample scandal, and the corrected held-out result2026-06-22
- HELIX-120M-5B-EXTThe 127M 5B-token extension: three attempts, one parameter-bound verdict2026-06-29
- HELIX-200M-C1X-RECOVERYThe WSD recovery anneal: 'the plateau was the schedule, not the model'2026-07-17
- HELIX-200M-SFT-FAILURESDirect SFT on the 209M base: four failures2026-07-19
- HELIX-200M-FINAL-BAKEOFFFinal post-training bakeoff: DPO-100 selected, a challenger left unresolved2026-07-24
- HELIX-200M-SFT-ACTIVEhelix-200m-chat-tonight-v1 — post-DPO SFT round, in progress2026-07-24
- MLXR-HOTSWAPmlx-recurrence v2 kernels hot-swapped into a live training run2026-06-10
- DC2-BENCH-82KD-CSIL-2 capability benchmark across training checkpoints2026-04-24
- DC1-DPO-E8D-CSIL-1 DPO/LoRA post-training evaluation (epoch 8)2026-04-10
- SLM10M-EVALSLM-10M zero-shot leaderboard evaluation2026-06-23
- HXO-EXP-0005HELIX-Ω 10M-class TensorAxis engineering smoke2026-08-24
- HXO-EXP-0007HELIX-Ω three-seed WikiText-2 TensorAxis pilot2026-08-24
- HXO-EXP-0008HELIX-Ω matched identity-diagonal rescue2026-08-25