Independent developer Pinkstack has released Fijik 2.0, a 350-million-parameter language model positioned as an open-license competitor to Liquid AI's LFM2.5. Built atop IBM's Granite 4 350M base, the model underwent continued pre-training on approximately six billion tokens, extending its knowledge cutoff to August 2025. A subsequent post-training phase employed a custom supervised fine-tuning corpus incorporating mixed reasoning traces.
The release addresses a growing friction point in the small-model ecosystem: licensing restrictions. While LFM2.5 has drawn praise for its performance at this parameter scale, its custom license limits commercial deployment. Fijik 2.0 adopts Apache-2.0, permitting unrestricted use, modification, and distribution. Benchmarks published on the Hugging Face repository show competitive results against similarly sized models.
The model weights are available in both safetensors and GGUF formats. The developer notes that quantization below bfloat16 is not recommended and warns that Fijik 2.0 does not follow the standard ChatML template, requiring manual chat format configuration in tools like LM Studio.
For developers deploying on-device or edge inference, this release expands the pool of truly open nano-LLMs suitable for privacy-sensitive or offline applications. The work also demonstrates how community-driven continued pre-training can extend the utility of foundation models released by major labs.
