Deploy MiniCPM5-1B with Ollama

One-binary, no-Python laptop deployment. Consumes the released GGUF.

Required input

Steps

1. Install Ollama (once)

brew install ollama                                # macOS
# or:
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh      # Linux

OLLAMA_FLASH_ATTENTION=1 OLLAMA_KV_CACHE_TYPE=q8_0 ollama serve &

2. Download the GGUF + write Modelfile

mkdir -p ~/${MODEL_NAME} && cd ~/${MODEL_NAME}

huggingface-cli download ${GGUF_REPO} MiniCPM5-1B-${QUANT}.gguf --local-dir .

cat > Modelfile <<EOF
FROM ./MiniCPM5-1B-${QUANT}.gguf

# MiniCPM5 chat template (matches release tokenizer)
TEMPLATE """{{- if .Messages -}}
{{- range .Messages -}}
<|im_start|>{{ .Role }}
{{ .Content }}<|im_end|>
{{ end -}}
<|im_start|>assistant
{{ end -}}"""

PARAMETER stop "<|im_end|>"
PARAMETER stop "</s>"

# Defaults tuned for nothink mode
PARAMETER temperature 0.7
PARAMETER top_p 0.95
PARAMETER num_ctx 8192
EOF

3. Create + run

ollama create ${MODEL_NAME} -f Modelfile
ollama run ${MODEL_NAME}

4. Validate via OpenAI-compatible API

curl http://localhost:11434/v1/chat/completions \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{
        "model": "minicpm5-1b",
        "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "1+1=?"}],
        "temperature": 0.7, "top_p": 0.95, "max_tokens": 64
    }'

Expected: "2" in the reply.

Think mode

Default Modelfile is nothink. For think:

ollama run ${MODEL_NAME} --temperature 0.9 --top-p 0.95

Or bake it into a separate model tag by flipping temperature 0.7 to temperature 0.9 (topp stays 0.95) and ollama create ${MODELNAME}-think -f Modelfile.think.

To force the auto-injected <think>\n prefix, use raw mode:

curl http://localhost:11434/api/generate -d '{
    "model": "minicpm5-1b",
    "raw": true,
    "prompt": "<|im_start|>user\n鸡兔同笼…<|im_end|>\n<|im_start|>assistant\n<think>\n",
    "options": {"temperature": 0.9, "top_p": 0.95}
}'

Common pitfalls

• Error: invalid file magic: corrupted download. Re-run huggingface-cli download.

When NOT to use

• Highest throughput on Mac → minicpm5-deploy-mlx (Q4 build)
• GUI experience → minicpm5-deploy-lmstudio
• NVIDIA GPU production → minicpm5-deploy-vllm

Reference

[docs/deployment/ollama.md](../../docs/deployment/ollama.md)