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v0.2.0

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@arinltte arinltte released this 21 Sep 06:11
· 9 commits to main since this release
v0.2.0
326e94f

kevMac v0.2.0

Dynamic model selection, built on the new kev Qwen3.5 family.

What's new

  • Model picker. A Model menu in the toolbar lists every supported checkpoint. The setup now installs kev-0.8b by default; models already downloaded say so in the menu, and the rest show their download size — pick one to download it on demand, then the engine restarts on it automatically.
  • kev-0.8b (new default). The smallest model of the Qwen3.5 family, replacing the 0.6B: 0.829 in-distribution (was 0.801), 0.643 out of domain (was 0.620), and the first small Kev that learns rule composition (held-out pairs 0.38 vs 0.08).
  • Bigger models, one click away. kev-4b (0.877, ~8 GB) and kev-9b (0.876, ~19 GB memory) appear in the picker as download options — downloaded only if you choose them.
  • v0.1.0 compatible. Upgrades keep every previously downloaded model working — kev-0.6b stays in the picker and serves exactly as before; the engine was updated to transformers 5.17 with Qwen3.5's Gated DeltaNet support while attention-only backbones keep the packed fast path.
  • Everything else is unchanged: plain-text questions in, animated answers out, one-button setup into ~/.kevMac, fully offline serving.

Measured on a MacBook Pro (M4, 16 GB)

One five-question request: kev-0.6b ~0.2 s, kev-0.8b ~0.9 s. The Qwen3.5 DeltaNet kernels have no MPS implementation yet (PyTorch falls back to slow reference kernels), so the 0.8B trades ~4× latency for the accuracy gain — the kev README notes an MLX backend for Qwen3.5 is the next planned change. For the lowest latency on a Mac, keep kev-0.6b; for the best accuracy, use kev-0.8b or larger.

Model notes

Model Base Serves In-distribution Download
kev-0.6b Qwen3-0.6B-Base fp32, ~0.2 s 0.801 ~1.2 GB
kev-0.8b Qwen3.5-0.8B-Base bf16, ~0.9 s 0.829 ~1.6 GB
kev-4b Qwen3.5-4B-Base bf16 0.877 ~8 GB
kev-9b Qwen3.5-9B-Base bf16, ~19 GB memory 0.876 ~18 GB

kev-9b needs ~19 GB of memory — it does not fit a 16 GB Mac. kev-4b fits but is tight; both are there for machines with more memory.

Install

Download the kevMac-macOS-v020.dmg from the Releases page, open it, and drag kevMac to your Applications folder — then launch and press Start Setup only if the engine hasn't been set up yet (upgrades from v0.1.0 need nothing; the new model downloads from the Model menu when you pick it).

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/arinltte/kevMac.git
cd kevMac
open kevMac.xcodeproj

Press Run in Xcode. Nothing is installed outside ~/.kevMac; remove it any time with rm -rf ~/.kevMac.

The decision engine is kev by Jared Palmer (Apache-2.0); the model weights are on the Hugging Face Hub; the base models carry the Qwen license. kevMac is MIT licensed.

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