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MacBook M5 Pro and Qwen3.5 = Local AI Security System

sharpai.org

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Re: MacBook M5 Pro and Qwen3.5 = Local AI Security System

#21

Post by alcazar »

aegis_camera wrote: post #17
alcazar wrote: post #16

This seems like an inevitable idea: a security system with full context. So you don't get alerts about your friend's car plates or your kid coming home late.

Exactly, the memory of full context is very personal, so I'd like to keep the local.

Are we “there” yet? To the point where deploying this as a serious security system makes sense? Or are we still in the research and demo phase?

My intuition is that OpenClaw-like systems still make too many mistakes to be trusted with security. And that it will take more months or years until the models and harnesses are truly ready.

Re: MacBook M5 Pro and Qwen3.5 = Local AI Security System

#23

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

This is a very flashy page that's glossing over some pretty boring things.

- This is a benchmark for "home security" workflows. I.e., extremely simple tasks that even open weight models from a year ago could handle.

- They're only comparing recent Qwen models to SOTA. Recent Qwen models are actually significantly slower than older Qwen models, and other open weight model families.

- Specific tasks do better with specific models. Are you doing VL? There's lots of tiny VL models now that will be faster and more accurate than small Qwen models. Are you doing multiple languages? Qwen supports many languages but none of them well. Need deep knowledge? Any really big model today will do, or you can use RAG. Need reasoning? Qwen (and some others) love to reason, often too much. They mention Qwen taking 435ms to first token, which is slow compared to some other models.

Yes, Qwen 3.5 is very capable. But there will never be one model that does everything the best. You get better results by picking specific models for specific tasks, designing good prompts, and using a good harness.

And you definitely do not need an M5 mac for all of this. Even a capable PC laptop from 2 years ago can do all this. Everyone's really excited for the latest toys, and that's fine, but please don't let people trick you into thinking you need the latest toys. Even a smartphone can do a lot of these tasks with local AI.

Re: MacBook M5 Pro and Qwen3.5 = Local AI Security System

#24

Post by hparadiz »

johndough wrote: post #18
segmondy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very false. My first system was a 3060 which you can buy new for about $300 or used for about $200. If you already have an existing system you can use it, else you can pick up a used PC for about $150. Entry is about $500.

Perhaps OP was referring to a usable agentic system, for which $2500 sounds about right. I've got a 3060 myself, which is nice to play around with the smaller models for free (minus electricity) and with 100% uptime, but I was not able to program anything with them yet that I didn't want to rewrite completely. A heavily quantized Qwen3.5-27B model is getting close though. Maybe in a few months.

I was actually thinking of the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 which compiles the linux kernel in 62 seconds and is the first usable integrated graphics solution I've seen.

Benchmarks: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rpw17y/ryzen_a...

Re: MacBook M5 Pro and Qwen3.5 = Local AI Security System

#25

Post by hparadiz »

aegis_camera wrote: post #15
bigyabai wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If "small models" is the bar, then you can run inference for ~$50 on Raspberry Pi like hardware. I do that with 1.8b-4b models.

LFM 450M for vision task, QWEN 9B Q4 for Orchestration, this provides a good result.

I actually meant a context window of about 50k which is what you need to run OpenClaw well.

Re: MacBook M5 Pro and Qwen3.5 = Local AI Security System

#27

Post by BoredPositron »

hparadiz wrote: post #6

Currently the barrier to entry for local models is about $2500. Funny thing is $2500 is about the amount my parents paid for a 166 MHZ machine in 1995.

The used model is 9B even with a big context you can easily run it on 16GB. You don't need a $2500 machine for it.

Re: MacBook M5 Pro and Qwen3.5 = Local AI Security System

#28

Post by psyclobe »

I have always envisioned a ai server being part of a family's major purchases e.g. when they buy a house, appliance, etc. they also buy a 'ai system'.

Machine hardware evolution is slowing down, pretty soon you can buy one big ass server that will last potentially decades as it would be purpose built for ai.

Things like 'context based home security' yeah thats just, automatic, free, part of the ai system.

Everyone will talk to the ai through their phones and it'll be connected to the house, it'll have lineage info of the family may be passed down through generations etc, and it'll all be 100% owned, offline, for the family; a forever assistant just there.

Re: MacBook M5 Pro and Qwen3.5 = Local AI Security System

#29

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

johndough wrote: post #18
segmondy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very false. My first system was a 3060 which you can buy new for about $300 or used for about $200. If you already have an existing system you can use it, else you can pick up a used PC for about $150. Entry is about $500.

Perhaps OP was referring to a usable agentic system, for which $2500 sounds about right. I've got a 3060 myself, which is nice to play around with the smaller models for free (minus electricity) and with 100% uptime, but I was not able to program anything with them yet that I didn't want to rewrite completely. A heavily quantized Qwen3.5-27B model is getting close though. Maybe in a few months.

Strix Halo systems were ~$1500. They've gone up in price due to demand, but that is a perfectly usable "agentic system" (whatever that means). If 128GB VRAM and a fast GPU isn't good enough, I don't know what is.

Re: MacBook M5 Pro and Qwen3.5 = Local AI Security System

#30

Post by llm_nerd »

Neat, but why would you want a clumsy LLM to know what happened with your security system? Things happened or they didn't, and that's what dashboards are for.

Seems like trying to make a need from the tools. My security system front page shows me every event that happened at my house, and I don't have to interrogate it on every happenstance, and I don't see what the value of that is.

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