---
license: apache-2.0
library_name: gguf
base_model: HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M
language:
- dna
tags:
- dna
- genomic
- llama.cpp
- gguf
- hybriddna
---

# Carbon-500M GGUF

GGUF (bf16) conversion of [HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M](https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M) for use with [llama.cpp](https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp).

Carbon is a hybrid DNA / English language model that switches between Qwen3-4B-Base byte-level BPE for natural text and fixed 6-mer chunking for DNA inside `<dna>...</dna>` tags.

## Requires a recent llama.cpp

HybridDNATokenizer support was merged in [ggml-org/llama.cpp#23410](https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/23410), so any build from `master` after that works:

```bash
git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp
cd llama.cpp && cmake -B build && cmake --build build -j
```

## Files

| File | Quant | Size |
|---|---|---|
| `carbon-500m-bf16.gguf` | bf16 (lossless from source) | 983 MB |

## Usage

### Download

```bash
hf download HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M-GGUF carbon-500m-bf16.gguf --local-dir .
```

### Basic DNA completion

```bash
./build/bin/llama-completion -m carbon-500m-bf16.gguf \
    -p '<dna>ATGCGCTAGCTACGATCGATCGTAGCTAGCTAGCTAGCTACG' \
    -n 64 --temp 0 -no-cnv
```

### As a draft model for speculative decoding

Carbon-500M shares the HybridDNA vocab with the larger models, so it makes an excellent draft model:

```bash
# 8B target + 500M draft -> ~2x speedup at temp=0
./build/bin/llama-speculative \
    -m  carbon-8b-bf16.gguf \
    -md carbon-500m-bf16.gguf \
    -p '<dna>ATGCGCTAGCTACGATCGATCGTAGCTAGCTAGCTAGCTACG' \
    -n 256 --temp 0
```

## See also

- Source weights: [HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M](https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M)
- Other GGUF variants: [500M](https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-500M-GGUF) · [3B](https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-3B-GGUF) · [8B](https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-8B-GGUF)

## License

Apache-2.0, inherited from the source model.