Meet the Underdog Saluki 27B: A 2-bit Qwen3.8-27B That Beats the Original at Tool Calling

תקציר מקורי באנגליתUnderdog, the on-device assistant from Conway Research, has released Saluki 27B under Apache 2.0. Underdog Saluki 27B is a 2-bit GGUF of Qwen3.8-27B that fits in 7.89 GB. The full BF16 model needs 54 GB. Underdog tuned the compression to protect tool calling, the skill that turns a chat model into an agent. For developers, that means a 27B-class agent model that runs in stock llama.cpp . TL;DR Size: 27B dense parameters. 7.89 GB GGUF versus 54 GB for BF16. Runs on: stock llama.cpp and apps built on it, with full GPU offload. Optional 629 MB or 928 MB vision add-on. Performance: 96% average retention across 9 benchmarks versus full Qwen3.8-27B. Best: Parallel tool calls, 42 versus 35 for the full model (120% retention). Worst: AIME 2025, 79.2 versus 96.7 (about 82% retention). Bottom line: