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A few words on DS4

antirez.com

61–70 of 197 posts

Re: A few words on DS4

#61
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empirically, DS4 is hosting the DeepSeek v4 Flash model with good performance on home hardware. I'm curious how you came to this conclusion.

"Empirically", have you tested this yourself?

It's trivial to find reviews and benchmarks of DS4 online. Also, there are benchmarks in the article.

Here's one of the top hits: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/fully-custom-cuda-nati...

Bizarre comment; sounds like "How do you know Porsches are fast? Did you drive one?"

Re: A few words on DS4

#62
post #55

I'm very curious where we will saturate the curve on "enough" intelligence for coding. At some point, you can let a less smart model hammer at a problem for longer and get to the same result, and as long as you are not involved it comes to the same thing. I feel like DeepSeek V4 Pro is nearly there. Maybe Flash is too. Once we hit that point, I am curious how much of Anthropic's current business model falls apart? So…

> At some point, you can let a less smart model hammer at a problem for longer and get to the same result, and as long as you are not involved it comes to the same thing.

Is that true? I find the smarter models can just be effective when smaller models can't. It isn't a matter of just waiting longer.

Re: A few words on DS4

#63

With "intelligence" (or whatever you want to call it) and speed both seeming to ramp up quickly with local models I wonder what the growth rate and ceiling(?) might be in this space. Will this kind of iq and performance work with just e.g: 16GB RAM in a couple years? Is there a new kind of Moore's law to be defined here?

640gb ought to be enough for anybody

Re: A few words on DS4

#64
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be a jerk but 31t/s prefill is basically unusable in an agentic situation. A mere 10k in context and you're sitting there for 5+ minutes before the first token is generated.

That prefill number isn't right. M4 Max hits 200-300: https://github.com/antirez/ds4/blob/main/speed-bench/m4_max_...

M5 studio is gonna sell like hot cakes

Re: A few words on DS4

#65
post #62
post #55

I'm very curious where we will saturate the curve on "enough" intelligence for coding. At some point, you can let a less smart model hammer at a problem for longer and get to the same result, and as long as you are not involved it comes to the same thing. I feel like DeepSeek V4 Pro is nearly there. Maybe Flash is too. Once we hit that point, I am curious how much of Anthropic's current business model falls apart? So…

> At some point, you can let a less smart model hammer at a problem for longer and get to the same result, and as long as you are not involved it comes to the same thing. Is that true? I find the smarter models can just be effective when smaller models can't. It isn't a matter of just waiting longer.

it's almost certainly not true yet but at some point there might be an equilibrium reached of speed Vs quality (and let's not forget, cost) where it's true for most of what you do.

Perhaps you'd still turn to hosted models for the hardest tasks, but most tasks go local. It does seem like that would make demand go down significantly.

Of course that's all predicated on model advances plateauing, or at least getting increasingly more expensive for incremental improvements, such that local open source models can catch up on that speed/quality/cost curve. But there is a fair amount of evidence that's happening. The models are still getting noticably better, but relative improvement does seem to be slowing, and cost is seemingly only going up.

Re: A few words on DS4

#66
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Empirically", have you tested this yourself?

It's trivial to find reviews and benchmarks of DS4 online. Also, there are benchmarks in the article. Here's one of the top hits: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/fully-custom-cuda-nati... Bizarre comment; sounds like "How do you know Porsches are fast? Did you drive one?"

[flagged]

Re: A few words on DS4

#67
Did someone compare DeepSeek 4 Flash to Qwen3.6-27B on real tasks (quality + speed)? According to the benchmarks at artificialanalysis.ai, Qwen3.6-27B is better at agentic tasks, and DS4 is only 2 points better at coding (both with max reasoning effort, full weights). At the same time, DS4 requires 5 times more VRAM even at 2 bits. Last time I explored this topic, large MoE models at 2-3 bits usually performed worse (quality-wise) than dense ~30B models at 4-8 bits, despite being much heavier to run.

Sure, MoE models have more knowledge, but extreme quantization may negate the benefits. And generally for coding tasks, you don't need a model that has memorized all the irrelevant trivia like, I don't know, the list of all villages in country X. DS4 also seems to run much slower on Mac Studio Ultra, which appears to be more or less in the same price range as RTX 5090. RTX 5090 gives me 50-60 tok/sec and 260k context with Unsloth's 5-bit quantization (only some layers are 5-bit too) and an 8-bit KV cache; prefill is instant too. It works flawlessly in OpenCode.

If you already have a spare high-end Mac, I can see the benefit, but I'm not sure it's a good configuration overall. Unless Qwen3.6 is more benchmaxxed than DS4 :)

Re: A few words on DS4

#68
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Empirically", have you tested this yourself?

It's trivial to find reviews and benchmarks of DS4 online. Also, there are benchmarks in the article. Here's one of the top hits: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/fully-custom-cuda-nati... Bizarre comment; sounds like "How do you know Porsches are fast? Did you drive one?"

Parent is simply pointing out the incorrect usage of "empirically", which should typically only be mentioned when you've tested it yourself.

Re: A few words on DS4

#69
post #49
post #46

DwarfStar4 is a small LLM inference runtime that can run DeepSeek 4. The blog post implies that it currently requires 96GB of VRAM. For others who are lacking context :-)

Thanks. Outside of LLM circles, DS4 is usually a video game controller.

Or a car from Citroen

Re: A few words on DS4

#70
post #49
post #46

DwarfStar4 is a small LLM inference runtime that can run DeepSeek 4. The blog post implies that it currently requires 96GB of VRAM. For others who are lacking context :-)

Thanks. Outside of LLM circles, DS4 is usually a video game controller.

Trekkies are experiencing a major regression from Deep Space Nine.
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