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DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

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Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#31

So just gonna ask a question, probably will get downvoted I know this is flash, but…. But other than this guy, did our whole society seriously never flamegraph this stuff before we started requesting nuclear reactors colocated at data centers and like more than 10% of gdp? Someone needs to answer because this isn’t even a m4 or m5… WHAT THE FUCK Sidenote: shout out antirez love my redis :)

This is built atop a tower of stuff people built with profiling and performance-oriented design. That said, I've found that most corporate environments are unintentionally hostile to this kind of optimization work. It's hard to justify until the work is already done. That means you often need people with the skills, means, and motivation to do this that are outside normal corporate constraints. There aren't many of t…

Building this into agentic dev workflows (subject to token/time constraints) is something I spent a lot of time doing at work. I actually am kind of proud of that hahah

But you’re right I agree

In the corporate world they sadly don’t take kindly to performance profiling as a first class citizen

Granted I will say optimization without requirements may not be beneficial but at least profiling itself seems worthy if you have use cases.

A lot of us have been working in the network packet pusher software , distributed systems , distributed storage space

I’m happy to see more stuff like this :)

TLDR; I’ve not seen a lot of flamegraphs of Llm end to end … idk if anyone else has?

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#32

So just gonna ask a question, probably will get downvoted I know this is flash, but…. But other than this guy, did our whole society seriously never flamegraph this stuff before we started requesting nuclear reactors colocated at data centers and like more than 10% of gdp? Someone needs to answer because this isn’t even a m4 or m5… WHAT THE FUCK Sidenote: shout out antirez love my redis :)

Every lab has a bunch of people doing nothing but optimizing.

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#33
post #15

A random, funny, interesting and telling data point: my MacBook M3 Max while DS4 is generating tokens at full speed peaks 50W of energy usage...

"Data centers for LLMs are technically more energy efficient per-user than self-hosting LLM models due to economies-of-scale" is a data point the internet isn't ready for.

[deleted]

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#34
post #13

I am curious about it producing less tokens except for the max mode. I love DeepSeek V4 Flash and I use it extensively, it's so cheap I can use it all day and still not use all my 10$ OpenCode Go subscription. I use it always in max mode because of this, but now I wonder whether I should rather use high.

On max it uses more than twice as many tokens as on high when running the ArtificialAnalysis benchmark suite, and then it's indeed the model with the highest token usage (among the current top tier models). See the "Intelligence vs. Token Use" chart here:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?models=gpt-5-5%2Cgpt-5-...

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#36
Heh, I made something very similar for the Qwen3 models a while back. It only runs Qwen3, supports only some quants, loads from GGUF, and has inference optimized by Claude (in a loop). The whole thing is compact (just a couple of files) and easy to reason about. I made it for my students so they could tinker with it and learn (add different decoding strategies, add abliteration, etc.). Popular frameworks are large, complex, and harder to hack on, while educational projects usually focus on something outdated like GPT-2.

Even though the project was meant to be educational, it gave me an idea I can't get out of my head: what if we started building ultra-optimized inference engines tailored to an exact GPU+model combination? GPUs are expensive and harder to get with each day. If you remove enough abstractions and code directly to the exact hardware/model, you can probably optimize things quite a lot (I hope). Maybe run an agent which tries to optimize inference in a loop (like autoresearch), empirically testing speed/quality.

The only problem with this is that once a model becomes outdated, you have to do it all again from scratch.

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#38
post #24
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

equals 2 or 3 human brains in power usage. Amazing work!

True quantitatively, not qualitatively. DeepSeek V4 is not capable of doing what a human brain can do, of course, but for the tasks it can do, it can do it at a speed which is completely impossible for a human, so comparing the two requires some normalization for speed.

I'm sure human brain, at least my present brain, is incapable of many things DeepSeek V4 can do. Qualitatively.

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#39
post #13

I am curious about it producing less tokens except for the max mode. I love DeepSeek V4 Flash and I use it extensively, it's so cheap I can use it all day and still not use all my 10$ OpenCode Go subscription. I use it always in max mode because of this, but now I wonder whether I should rather use high.

How has opencode go been for you? Worth changing over from Claude pro?

I've found that opencode and codex are the two subscriptions that still seem to subsize usage. Deepseek V4 has been the most powerful model in opencode IMO, I trust it with problems where I can validate the solution such as debugging an issue - but I only trust the proprietary GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 models for writing code that matters.
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