Puro-2B: Poor Lab's Qwen2-1.5B Trained on RTX 5090 within $5090
Under our fixed 15-benchmark base-model evaluation, one checkpoint in the
Puro-2B collection beats Qwen2-1.5B at about $4.4K; the canonical final model
goes further, approaching Qwen2.5-1.5B at a measured rental-equivalent
accelerator cost of $6,891.
Puro-2B (普罗-2B) is a 2B-parameter dense causal language model pretrained
from scratch on 1.4T tokens. It uses a Qwen3-1.7B-compatible architecture with
untied input and output embeddings, blockwise FP8 training, the MuonH optimizer,
and a two-phase data recipe. Training ran entirely on consumer-grade NVIDIA
RTX 5090 GPUs.
The architecture is based on the Qwen3-1.7B configuration, not on pretrained
Qwen weights. Puro-2B starts from random initialization.
Puro-2B cost and quality comparison
Why Puro-2B?
Puro-2B is intended to make billion-parameter pretraining inspectable and
affordable for smaller research groups. The release covers more than the final
weights:
A canonical 2B base model and intermediate or controlled checkpoints: this repo.
The main recipe combines RTX 5090 infrastructure, blockwise FP8, MuonH with
hyperball constraints, proxy-guided data selection, and a curriculum-aware
late continuation followed by checkpoint averaging.
Puro-2B end-to-end training pipeline
The $5,090 Result, Explained
The collection contains multiple checkpoints with different Phase 2 budgets
and recipes. The report's approximately $4.4K result is an observed
uniform-recipe checkpoint that already exceeds Qwen2-1.5B on the report's
15-task aggregate. It is not the canonical final checkpoint.
The canonical Puro-2B-Base model is the strongest released endpoint. Its
production run used 22,514 measured active-training GPU-hours, corresponding
to $6,891 under the report's normalized RTX 5090 rental rate.
These figures are accelerator-only reproduction estimates. They exclude data
acquisition and preprocessing, proxy and ablation experiments, failed runs,
post-training, evaluation, storage, networking, and research labor. They should
not be read as the total cost of developing the project.
Puro-2B estimated efficiency factors
Puro Cost Scaling Law across five Phase 2 budgets
The scaling-law panel labels points by cumulative reproduction cost. The model
catalog below maps those costs to Phase 2 budget fractions. Each fraction
applies only to Phase 2 data exposure, while the cost includes the shared Phase
1 run.
Model Details
Property
Value
Model type
Dense decoder-only causal language model
Parameters
Approximately 2B
Initialization
From scratch
Architecture
Qwen3-1.7B configuration with untied embeddings
Hidden size
2,048
Transformer layers
28
Attention heads / KV heads
16 / 8
Feed-forward size
6,144
Vocabulary size
151,936
Context length
4,096 tokens
Export class
Qwen3ForCausalLM
Weight format
Safetensors
This is a pretrained base model. It has not been instruction-tuned or
preference-aligned and should not be expected to behave like a chat assistant.
Quickstart
Use a Transformers release that supports the Qwen3 configuration:
All numbers below come from the same deterministic OpenCompass pipeline in the
technical report. The comparison uses pretrained/base checkpoints throughout.
Generation tasks use greedy decoding; multiple-choice tasks use fixed
token-likelihood ranking. Scores are percentages.
Model
Math + Code (4)
Reasoning + Knowledge (11)
Overall (15)
Qwen2-1.5B
40.29
60.54
55.14
Puro-2B
43.50
63.02
57.81
Qwen2.5-1.5B
47.52
65.53
60.73
The four math and code tasks are GSM8K, MATH, sanitized-MBPP, and HumanEval.
The eleven reasoning and knowledge tasks are MMLU, MMLU-Pro, ARC-Challenge,
ARC-Easy, BoolQ, CommonsenseQA, HellaSwag, PIQA, SocialIQA, WinoGrande, and
BBH. Each displayed average is an unweighted arithmetic mean.
The Puro Cost Scaling Law fits five single-run Phase 2 uniform-budget points.
It is a recipe-specific empirical scale-down relationship, not a universal law.
The fit has no uncertainty interval, and the available experiments do not
isolate curriculum ordering, constant-LR continuation, and checkpoint averaging
as independent causal gains.
Training
Setting
Phase 1
Phase 2
Tokens consumed
439B
960B
RTX 5090 GPUs
24
96
Parallelism (TP / PP / DP)
1 / 2 / 12
1 / 4 / 24
Base learning rate
5.00e-3 -> 1.04e-3
1.04e-3 -> 1.00e-5
Schedule
Power decay
Linear decay, then selected constant-LR continuation
Median TFLOP/s/GPU
238
192
Both phases use a sequence length of 4,096, a global batch size of 1,536
sequences, and a micro-batch size of 2. Main Transformer linear-layer GEMMs use
blockwise E4M3 FP8; numerically sensitive operations, master weights, and
optimizer states remain in BF16 or FP32 as appropriate.
Selected approximately scale-invariant matrix weights are updated by MuonH
with hyperball projection and zero weight decay. The remaining parameters use
AdamW with weight decay 0.1. The MuonH matrix group applies a 10x multiplier to
the shared base learning-rate schedule.
The final model uses an equal-weight parameter average of six checkpoints from
the constant-LR branch resumed at optimizer step 218,000:
222100, 222200, 222300, 222400, 222500, 222569
Only model parameters are averaged; optimizer states are not.
Endpoint of the uniform-ordering branch using 1/16 of the Phase 2 token budget; approximately $2.2K cumulative reproduction cost.
Author-controlled model weights, training code, processing code, and
documentation are released under Apache License 2.0 where marked. The
materialized dataset is distributed under other because its components retain
different upstream terms; see the dataset card's license matrix and notices.
Intended Use and Limitations
Puro-2B is intended for research on pretraining, data recipes, optimization,
model scaling, continued pretraining, and downstream adaptation. It can also be
used as a compact base model for task-specific post-training.
The model may produce inaccurate, biased, unsafe, offensive, or copyrighted
content. Its pretraining data includes web text, code, mathematics, Chinese and
English material, synthetic data, and instruction-formatted examples. The
release does not claim exhaustive removal of personal information, benchmark
contamination, or undesirable content. Evaluate and post-train the model for
your domain before deployment, and add application-specific safeguards where
people could be affected by its outputs.
License
The Puro-2B model weights are released under the
Apache License 2.0. The training
data remains subject to the dataset repository's documented upstream licenses
and terms.
Citation
Please cite our technical report if you find our work useful:
bibtex
1@misc{luo2026puro2b,
2 title = {Puro-2B: Poor Lab's Qwen2-1.5B Trained on RTX 5090 within {\$}5090},
3 author = {Kairong Luo and Jiarui Cui and Yaorui Yin and Shengqi Chen and
4 Yiming Yang and Linxiang Gao and Yanmohan Wang and Mingzhe Zhang and
5 Kaiyue Wen and Kaifeng Lyu and Wenguang Chen},
6 year = {2026},
7 eprint = {2608.27370},
8 archivePrefix = {arXiv},
9 primaryClass = {cs.CL},
10 url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27370}
11}
Acknowledgments
We thank Yanfu Investments for providing computational resources. See the
technical report for the complete acknowledgments and contributor list.