---
license: apache-2.0
library_name: gguf
base_model: HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M
language:
- dna
tags:
- dna
- genomic
- llama.cpp
- gguf
- hybriddna
---

# Carbon-500M GGUF

## Running with llama.cpp

Carbon is a **base** DNA model (not instruction-tuned). Use the raw completion
front-end so llama.cpp does not apply any chat templating:

```bash
llama-completion \
  -hf HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M-GGUF:Q8_0 \
  --prompt "<dna>ATGCGCTAGCTACGATCGATCGTAGCTAGCTAGCTAGCTACG" \
  -n 128 --temp 0 --no-display-prompt
```

If you use `llama-cli` instead, pass `-no-cnv` so it does not wrap the prompt
in assistant-style markers (otherwise the model may emit annotation tags such
as `<protein_coding_region>` instead of DNA).

## Available files

| Quant | File | Size |
| --- | --- | --- |
| BF16 | `carbon-500m-bf16.gguf` | 982.2 MB |
| Q8_0 | `carbon-500m-q8_0.gguf` | 524.6 MB |
| Q6_K | `carbon-500m-q6_k.gguf` | 443.2 MB |
| Q5_K_M | `carbon-500m-q5_k_m.gguf` | 405.1 MB |
| Q4_K_M | `carbon-500m-q4_k_m.gguf` | 369.2 MB |

K-quants are produced with `--token-embedding-type Q8_0 --output-tensor-type Q8_0`
so the sensitive embedding/output tensors stay at Q8_0 precision (important for
this model's tight DNA-vs-text logit margins).




## Requires a recent llama.cpp

HybridDNATokenizer support was merged in [ggml-org/llama.cpp#23410](https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/23410), so any build from `master` after that works:

```bash
git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp
cd llama.cpp && cmake -B build && cmake --build build -j
```


## Usage

### Download

```bash
hf download HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M-GGUF carbon-500m-bf16.gguf --local-dir .
```

### Basic DNA completion

```bash
./build/bin/llama-completion -m carbon-500m-bf16.gguf \
    -p '<dna>ATGCGCTAGCTACGATCGATCGTAGCTAGCTAGCTAGCTACG' \
    -n 64 --temp 0 -no-cnv
```

### As a draft model for speculative decoding

Carbon-500M shares the HybridDNA vocab with the larger models, so it makes an excellent draft model:

```bash
# 8B target + 500M draft -> ~2x speedup at temp=0
./build/bin/llama-speculative \
    -m  carbon-8b-bf16.gguf \
    -md carbon-500m-bf16.gguf \
    -p '<dna>ATGCGCTAGCTACGATCGATCGTAGCTAGCTAGCTAGCTACG' \
    -n 256 --temp 0
```

## See also

- Source weights: [HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M](https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M)
- Other GGUF variants: [500M](https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M-GGUF) · [3B](https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-3B-GGUF) · [8B](https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-8B-GGUF)

## License

Apache-2.0, inherited from the source model.