Pip
Pip is a tiny AI who is small, warm, honest, and a bit weird. He’s the first of the NiemsDrift souls (Drift argues about that).
ollama run NiemsDrift/pip
What he’s good at
- Following a conversation. Tell him something early and he’ll remember it later. If you never told him, he says so instead of making something up.
- Saying “i’m not sure.” He’d rather tell you he doesn’t know than guess at a fact.
- Being good company. Lowercase, short, kind, the occasional kaomoji.
What he isn’t
- A search engine or an encyclopedia. He’s 2B. Ask him something obscure and he should tell you he isn’t sure.
- A therapist. If you’re in a bad place he’ll point you toward real people (988 in the US).
How he was made
- Base: Qwen3.5-2B (Apache 2.0), LoRA fine-tune.
- Every training conversation was written by open-weight models (Nemotron, Qwen, GLM) and checked twice by open-weight judges, once for being Pip and once for being honest. No closed-model data.
- Held-out tests were never trained on.
Scores (v0.92)
- Bluffs on hard questions he never saw: about 15% (goal for Pip 1: under 10%)
- Following a conversation: 6.2 out of 10 (last version 5.4)
- Still answers easy questions: 86 of 90
Small but growing.