still waiting for the day I can comfortably run Claude Code with local llm's on MacOS with only 16gb of ram
How close is this? It says it needs 32GB min?
Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
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Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
#12LLMs on device is the future. It's more secure and solves the problem of too much demand for inference compared to data center supply, it also would use less electricity. It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. Most users don't need frontier model performance.
Man I really hope so, as, as much as I like Claude Code, I hate the company paying for it and tracking your usage, bullshit management control, etc. I feel like I'm training my replacement. Things feel like they are tightening vs more power and freedom. On device I would gladly pay for good hardware - it's my machine and I'm using as I see fit like an IDE.
Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
#13LLMs on device is the future. It's more secure and solves the problem of too much demand for inference compared to data center supply, it also would use less electricity. It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. Most users don't need frontier model performance.
Recently I built a graphRAG app with Qwen 3.5 4b for small tasks like classifying what type of question I am asking or the entity extraction process itself, as graphRAG depends on extracted triplets (entity1, relationship_to, entity2). I used Qwen 3.5 27b for actually answering my questions.
It works pretty well. I have to be a bit patient but that’s it. So in that particular use case, I would agree.
I used MLX and my M1 64GB device. I found that MLX definitely works faster when it comes to extracting entities and triplets in batches.
Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
#14LLMs on device is the future. It's more secure and solves the problem of too much demand for inference compared to data center supply, it also would use less electricity. It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. Most users don't need frontier model performance.
Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
#15LLMs on device is the future. It's more secure and solves the problem of too much demand for inference compared to data center supply, it also would use less electricity. It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. Most users don't need frontier model performance.
It isn't going to replace cloud LLMs since cloud LLMs will always be faster in throughput and smarter. Cloud and local LLMs will grow together, not replace each other. I'm not convinced that local LLMs use less electricity either. Per token at the same level of intelligence, cloud LLMs should run circles around local LLMs in efficiency. If it doesn't, what are we paying hundreds of billions of dollars for? I think lo…
Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
#16LLMs on device is the future. It's more secure and solves the problem of too much demand for inference compared to data center supply, it also would use less electricity. It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. Most users don't need frontier model performance.
You could argue that the only reason we have good open-weight models is because companies are trying to undermine the big dogs, and they are spending millions to make sure they dont get too far ahead. If the bubble pops then there wont be incentive to keep doing it.
When VCs inevitably ask their AI labs to start making money or shut down, those free open source LLMS will cease to be free.
Chinese AI labs have to release free open source models because they distill from OpenAI and Anthropic. They will always be behind. Therefore, they can't charge the same prices as OpenAI and Anthropic. Free open source is how they can get attention and how they can stay fairly close to OpenAI and Anthropic. They have to distill because they're banned from Nvidia chips and TSMC.
Before people tell me Chinese AI labs do use Nvidia chips, there is a huge difference between using older gimped Nvidia H100 (called H20) chips or sneaking around Southeast Asia for Blackwell chips and officially being allowed to buy millions of Nvidia's latest chips to build massive gigawatt data centers.
Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
#17LLMs on device is the future. It's more secure and solves the problem of too much demand for inference compared to data center supply, it also would use less electricity. It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. Most users don't need frontier model performance.
"Most users don't need frontier model performance" unfortunately, this is not the case.
Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
How close is this? It says it needs 32GB min?
You can run Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on 32GB of RAM sure, although to get 'Claude Code' performance, which I assume he means Sonnet or Opus level models in 2026, this will likely be a few years away before its runnable locally (with reasonable hardware).
I am wondering how people rave so much about local "small devices" LLM vs what codex or Claude code are capable of.
Sadly there are too much hype on local LLM, they look great for 5min tests and that's it.
Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
#19LLMs on device is the future. It's more secure and solves the problem of too much demand for inference compared to data center supply, it also would use less electricity. It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. Most users don't need frontier model performance.
It isn't going to replace cloud LLMs since cloud LLMs will always be faster in throughput and smarter. Cloud and local LLMs will grow together, not replace each other. I'm not convinced that local LLMs use less electricity either. Per token at the same level of intelligence, cloud LLMs should run circles around local LLMs in efficiency. If it doesn't, what are we paying hundreds of billions of dollars for? I think lo…
the webgpu model in my browser on my m4 pro macbook was as good as chatgpt 3.5 and doing 80+ tokens/s
Local is here.
Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man I really hope so, as, as much as I like Claude Code, I hate the company paying for it and tracking your usage, bullshit management control, etc. I feel like I'm training my replacement. Things feel like they are tightening vs more power and freedom. On device I would gladly pay for good hardware - it's my machine and I'm using as I see fit like an IDE.
When local LLMs get good enough for you to use delightfully, cloud LLMs will have gotten so much smarter that you'll still use it for stuff that needs more intelligence.
Code tools that free my time up is very nice.