โ๏ธ Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Reasoning-Distill (GGUF) โ๏ธ
๐งโ๐ป A fast little coding brain โ local AI for everyone
12B total params, only 2.5B active per token. This is a Mixture-of-Experts model, so it runs
like a ~2.5B model but thinks like a 12B one. ๐
Built on JetBrains' Mellum 2 (a from-scratch software-engineering model) and tuned on Claude Opus
4.6 / 4.7 / 4.8 reasoning traces โ it reasons step-by-step in <think> blocks, then answers. ๐ง ๐ป
All local, all yours, no API, no cloud. And it's seriously fast.
โก Blazing fast โ measured, not marketing ๐๏ธ๐จ
~440 tokens/sec on a single RTX 5090 at Q4_K_M (--n-gpu-layers 99 -fa on) โ and generation quality
holds up: correct, coherent code and clean step-by-step reasoning. ๐ฏ
You get big-model answers at small-model speed. Why so quick? It's a Mixture-of-Experts (only 2.5B of
the 12B params fire per token) with a compact 98K vocab โ so it generates several times faster than a
dense model its size, with no draft / speculative model needed. ๐
๐ฆ Pick your size (GGUF quants)
๐ก It's a Mixture-of-Experts: all 64 experts live on disk/VRAM (so size is for the whole 12B), but
only 8 fire per token โ that's why it's so quick.
๐งฎ "Will it fit?" โ rough VRAM guide
Mellum2 has a tiny KV cache (GQA with just 4 KV heads, and sliding-window attention on 3 of every 4
layers) โ so context is rarely the limiter. Pick the quant that fits your VRAM and you'll have plenty
of room for long context (max is 131K). Rough numbers ๐ค (weights + ~2 GB overhead):
๐ก Apple Silicon / iGPUs with unified memory count too โ same idea, just slower than a dGPU.
๐ก Tight on room? Drop a quant or use a q4_0 KV cache for even more context.
๐ How to run it (super easy)
Option A โ llama.cpp (recommended) ๐ฆ
- Grab a quant above (e.g.
โฆ-Q4_K_M.gguf) and llama-server from llama.cpp.
โ ๏ธ Needs a recent llama.cpp that supports the mellum2 architecture (a mid-2026 build or newer).
Older builds fail with unknown architecture: 'mellum2'.
- Run a server (Windows
.bat shown โ tweak --port, --ctx-size to taste):
- Open
http://localhost:18080 and chat. ๐ (Tip: bump --ctx-size โ the KV cache is small, so go big.)
Option B โ one-click apps ๐ฑ๏ธ
Works in LM Studio, Jan, Ollama, etc. โ just import the GGUF, pick your quant, go. ๐พ
(Make sure the app ships a recent llama.cpp that knows mellum2.)
๐ง Thinking mode
This model thinks natively in <think> โฆ </think> blocks. The chat template handles it automatically;
the --reasoning-format deepseek flag tells llama.cpp to surface the reasoning cleanly.
Recommended sampling: temp 0.6, top_p 0.95, top_k 20 (JetBrains' official settings for the Thinking model).
๐ Prefer raw transformers? (click)
This repo ships GGUF (for llama.cpp). To run in raw transformers you need non-GGUF weights โ point mid
at the original JetBrains checkpoint (or your own merged fp16). Needs transformers >= 5.8 (the mellum
architecture is built in โ no trust_remote_code). It's a plain text CausalLM (not multimodal).
โก Why no MTP / draft model?
JetBrains' Mellum 2 uses Multi-Token Prediction as a training-time objective only โ it isn't exported to
the released weights, so there's no draft to ship. You don't need one: with just 2.5B active params and a
compact vocab, it already generates extremely fast (~440 tok/s on a 5090 at Q4_K_M). ๐๏ธ
๐งฉ What is this, exactly?
- Base:
JetBrains/Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Thinking
โ a from-scratch, software-engineering-focused Mixture-of-Experts model (12.15B total / 2.5B active,
28 layers, 64 experts with 8 active, 131K context). JetBrains already did SFT + RLVR on it; this is a light
extra LoRA distillation pass on top.
- This fine-tune: a low-intensity QLoRA-style pass over the attention projections, distilling Claude Opus
reasoning style into the model. It keeps Mellum 2's coding/agent strengths while nudging the reasoning
voice toward Opus. ๐ก
โ ๏ธ Good to know
- Coding-first: Mellum 2 is built for code generation, editing, debugging, tool-calls and agents. Great at
programming + structured reasoning; it's not a general-knowledge encyclopedia.
- Reduced refusals: the distillation data omits safety hedging, so it refuses less than a typical aligned
chat model. It is not safety-aligned โ add your own guardrails for production. Use responsibly. ๐
- The reasoning is stylistic synthetic CoT โ great for structure, but double-check facts and numbers.
- English-centric (handles other languages, but English is strongest).
๐ Data & License