OpenBMB, a Chinese AI company, has released ' MiniCPM5-1B, ' a small-scale language model with 1 billion parameters. MiniCPM5-1B is touted as having superior performance compared to AI models of similar size.
pic.twitter.com/cG18KD0x27 — OpenBMB (@OpenBMB) May 25, 2026MiniCPM5-1B is now live — the strongest open‑source base model under 2B.🚀🚀
🔥 Ranks #1 on the Artificial Analysis (AA) index for small models, scoring 17.9 to beat the 2B-scale Qwen3.5-2B (16.3).
⚡ Comprehensively surpasses Qwen3.5-0.8B and LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking in knowledge,…
MiniCPM5-1B is a lightweight AI model that can run on a CPU. The promotional images released by OpenBMB include phrases such as 'world's best 1 billion parameter-on-device large-scale language model' and 'small size, great potential,' as well as an image resembling a missile.
The following diagram compares the performance of 'MiniCPM5-1B,' 'Qwen3-0.6B,' 'Qwen3.5-0.8B,' and 'LFM2.5-1.2B.' MiniCPM5-1B boasts high overall performance, particularly in agent performance, coding performance, and logical thinking performance.
The MiniCPM5-1B has also secured the top spot in the performance rankings for models with fewer than 4.5 billion parameters, according to Artificial Analysis, a third-party organization.
A demo app was released that allows you to try having a conversation with the MiniCPM5-1B, so I tried it out. I typed in 'Should I put a screen protector on my smartphone screen or not?' and after it thought in Chinese, it displayed a response in Chinese. A rough translation would be something like 'Screen protectors can make your smartphone battery last longer,' which is completely off the mark.
When I typed 'Tell me in Japanese,' it thought in Chinese before displaying a Japanese answer. However, the answer was unrelated to the question, such as 'Japanese smartphones have their own powerful battery protection system that prevents premature battery degradation due to overheating and overcharging.' This shows that its Japanese conversational ability is far from practical.
The MiniCPM5-1B is available in four versions on Hugging Face and ModelScope: the base model 'MiniCPM5-1B,' the supervised fine-tuned 'MiniCPM5-1B-SFT,' the GGUF version 'MiniCPM5-1B-GGUF,' and the Apple Silicon optimized 'MiniCPM5-1B-MLX.' ModelScope also distributes the base model 'MiniCPM5-1B-Base.' The license is
MiniCPM5-1B-Base · Model base
https://www.modelscope.cn/models/OpenBMB/MiniCPM5-1B-Base
openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B · Hugging Face
https://huggingface.co/openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B
openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B-SFT · Hugging Face
https://huggingface.co/openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B-SFT
openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B-GGUF · Hugging Face
https://huggingface.co/openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B-GGUF
openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B-MLX · Hugging Face
https://huggingface.co/openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B-MLX
Furthermore, MiniCPM-Desk-Pet, a pet AI that takes advantage of the MiniCPM5-1B's 'small size that can run on a CPU,' has also been released. When MiniCPM-Desk-Pet is run, a character that can converse will appear on the desktop.
