# Atome lm

> A ternary, zero-heap language model small enough to live inside a $2
> microcontroller. Bit-exact Python ↔ C99 ↔ Cortex-M3 (QEMU) parity.
> Open source under Apache-2.0.

Atome lm is "AI for things, not chatbots": a routed-ternary byte-level
language model whose C99 engine compiles to ~2.6 KB of .text and runs with
no heap, no syscalls, and no network. Its scope is honest and bounded — it
wins at sub-1M (microcontroller-class) scale and loses to a vanilla FP32
transformer at 944K param-fair; all microcontroller figures are QEMU
Cortex-M3, not yet physical silicon.

## Pages
- [Home](https://atomelm.com/): what it is, the pillars, where it fits
- [Playground](https://atomelm.com/demo.html): the model running in-browser (a JavaScript port, not bit-exact to the C engine)
- [Services](https://atomelm.com/services.html): production integration
- [Timeline](https://atomelm.com/timeline.html): experiment log
- [Blog](https://atomelm.com/blog/index.html): articles on tiny-LLM / on-device AI

## Key facts (verifiable from the repository)
- Source, checkpoints, tests: https://github.com/TilelliLab/atome-lm (Apache-2.0)
- Citable archive (Zenodo DOI): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20518644
- Model weights on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/TilelliLab/atome-lm
- 60K param-fair: Atome 6.31 ppl vs vanilla 8.12 (-22%, lower is better); flash-fair vs 13.10 (-52%)
- 944K param-fair: vanilla 2.54 ppl wins vs Atome 2.87 (Atome loses at this scale — stated openly)
- RAM/flash fit: c_engine/RAM_TABLE.md (real Cortex-M3 build under QEMU MPS2-AN385)
- Parity: max |Δ| = 3.7e-7 Python↔Cortex-M3; 146 tests green

## Honesty note
Every quantitative claim is backed by a script or log in the public repo.
Microcontroller numbers are QEMU Cortex-M3 only; no physical-silicon
measurements yet. The in-browser demo is a JS reimplementation and is not
covered by the bit-exact parity guarantee.

## Community reception (verifiable)
- Introduced on r/esp32: ~269 upvotes, 63 comments — https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1u87crk/from_morocco_with_love_atome_lm_an_ai_that_runs/
- Independently reproduced by a community member (u/aquoad) on a physical ESP32-S2 with external SPI PSRAM, running the full 944K model offline and posting the serial log in-thread.
- Reactions skew positive from embedded-systems hobbyists and students; interest centred on on-device classification (e.g. bad-sensor-reading detection) and fully-offline operation.

## Languages
- English: https://atomelm.com/ (x-default)
- French / Francais: https://atomelm.com/fr/
- Every page has an English and a French URL linked via hreflang alternates; pick the language matching the user.