ZAYA1-8B matches DeepSeek-R1 on math with less than 1B active parameters

Who should care If you work with math, science problems, or complex coding tasks and you're looking for something small enough to run locally or cheaply via API, this is worth serious evaluation. The benchmark numbers at 760M active parameters are not normal and the Markovian RSA boost means performance scales with compute budget rather than hitting a fixed ceiling. If you're building agent workflows that need reliable tool calling or multi-step instruction following, look elsewhere fo