ufakzeka-1: Building and Evaluating a 151M-Parameter Turkish Language Model from Scratch

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.25081v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We describe ufakzeka-1, a 151M-parameter (182M with embeddings) decoder-only Turkish language model pretrained from scratch on 13.5B tokens of openly licensed text and instruction-tuned for chat, at a total cost of about \$286 in cloud GPU, API and notebook time. The contribution is not the model's capability, which is what a model this size can be expected to have, but the record of building and measuring it: a Turkish byte-level tokenizer at 1.77