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A few words on DS4

antirez.com

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Re: A few words on DS4

#151
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kilo (the open source coding agent) tested Deepseek v4 Pro and Flash vs Opus 4.7 and Kimi K2[1]. It did ok, but scored substantially less than Opus. It also cost nearly as much, even with the current launch promo pricing for Deepseek. That cost is interesting - I've seen similar things with Sonnet vs Opus, and in my own benchmarking there are some models that benchmark well, seem to have a good price but use so many…

Their pricing shown is without the discount. > With DeepSeek’s 75% promo applied to current rates, the same run would have cost closer to $0.55, putting it below Kimi K2.6 in absolute cost while scoring 9 points higher. I will be sad when the discount ends.

Oh misread that sorry!

Re: A few words on DS4

#152
post #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…

for unified memory, the dense models are way too slow and for local GPU-based setups, large MoE are too large but they're fine on unified memory systems

essentially, hardware is the main reason you may choose one or the other locally

i have a Strix Halo system so I will be trying this Dwarf Star 4 thingie eventually when i have some free time

Re: A few words on DS4

#153

It’s shocking how close this feels to claude, obviously it's much slower, but I don’t know that it’s significantly dumber. Interestingly the imatrix quantization seems to be better than whatever quant the zdr inference backends on open router are using. It was self aware enough yesterday to realize that it’s own server process was itself without me telling it, which is not something I’ve ever observed a local model d…

What prompt had you given it?

Re: A few words on DS4

#154
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Trekkies are experiencing a major regression from Deep Space Nine.

There were prototypes. The Cardassians never get it right the first (eight) times.

Re: A few words on DS4

#155

Love this, even if can't use it atm (not got the h/w - only 96gb on M2 Max). I get it the general comp/public will find it unusable or worse. Reminds me of how home computers were - mere toys - before they became personal computers (PC). On my h/w the only passable combo for me atm is pi agent + llama.cpp + nemotron cascade-2 model: to 1M context, hybrid arch doesn't crash & burn 1/N^2 with context depths of 10K-50K-…

It works on your computer I believe. There are a few positive reports.

Re: A few words on DS4

#156

When I ran DS4 Q2 the other day (without the new update Q2 imatrix) it was behaving quite poorly after a few agentic turns with opencode, it couldn't modify the files it was telling me the work was ready and didn't use any tool to update files

The bugs were on the API tool call handing. The model worked well. I would retest with updated code and gguf and I and many others never saw it missing anything obvious. Reliable tool call and reasoning. The project is a few days old so certain agents / API combinations definitely had DSML related issues.

Re: A few words on DS4

#157
post #5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How’s the token throughput / response time?

Healthy! prefill: 30.91 t/s, generation: 29.58 t/s From https://gist.github.com/simonw/31127f9025845c4c9b10c3e0d8612...

Prefill is 400 t/s in that hardware. Just if the prompt is very short you can't see the real speed and it will default to single token context processing.

Re: A few words on DS4

#158

More information about DwarfStar 4 (DS4) in the readme: https://github.com/antirez/ds4 The code seems based on llama.cpp and GGML. I don't fully understand why it is a standalone project. The readme discusses this: DwarfStar 4 is a small native inference engine specific for DeepSeek V4 Flash. It is intentionally narrow: ... I think the only bigger difference in DeepSeek V4 vs other models is maybe the type of self-at…

Check the readme better. The code overlap with ggml is very small, but a few kernel and ideas and the quants code were taken. Still the project connection with llama.cpp and ggml is huge and also present in the license because it's not a matter of code but of a whole ecosystem built, engineering lessons on how to do things and many other stuff. Also the readme explains exactly why a vertical inference system for a single model is the goal of the project.

Re: A few words on DS4

#159

Love this, even if can't use it atm (not got the h/w - only 96gb on M2 Max). I get it the general comp/public will find it unusable or worse. Reminds me of how home computers were - mere toys - before they became personal computers (PC). On my h/w the only passable combo for me atm is pi agent + llama.cpp + nemotron cascade-2 model: to 1M context, hybrid arch doesn't crash & burn 1/N^2 with context depths of 10K-50K-…

> even if can't use it atm (not got the h/w - only 96gb on M2 Max). Not sure if it works different on macOS, but with CUDA + DeepSeek-V4-Flash-IQ2XXS-w2Q2K-AProjQ8-SExpQ8-OutQ8-chat-v2-imatrix.gguf I can fit it within 96GB of VRAM, together with context, so theoretically I feel like you should too, unless macOS uses GB of RAM/VRAM for the OS/display by default.

On 96gb I can give up to about 88GB to the GPU with sysctl iogpu.wired_limit_mb=88000, without suffering any ill-effects. When pushed higher I tend to notice e.g. graphic driver errors, youtube web page not working, other semi-random glitches. So the ~80 GB of DS4-flash quants I could just about fit. Leaving some extra for the KV caches. Will try, I'm curious how's the DS4 degradation with context depth growth, how fast does tok/s drop. E.g. 2-bit lowest quant MiniMax-M2.6 runs, but starts low tok/s and degrades fast with context depth.

The biggest models I can comfortably run are about 1/2 the DS4F size - like gpt-oss-120b. Lately was toying with Ling-2.6-flash. Got the agents to adapt existing metal kernels in llama.cpp, and it did run (model https://huggingface.co/ljupco/Ling-2.6-flash-GGUF, branch https://github.com/ljubomirj/llama.cpp/tree/LJ-Ling-2.6-flas...). It's 104B-A7B4, and for the M2 Max 7.4B active is about the most it can take while still producing 40 tok/s. And the hybrid arch allows for graceful degradation, still close to 30 tok/s at 64K context depth.

Too bad L2.6F while the best have, is not that much better in agentic benchmarks compared to my current incumbent local llm (nemotron-cascade-2). Got inspired by DS4 to start a l26f branch (WIP https://github.com/ljubomirj/l26f). :-) Try squeeze the most from L2.6F. There should be low hanging fruit in good integration of the agent and the inferencing engine. On input - considering the huge difference cached v.s. non-cached tokens. On output - considering that the NN gives us the complete logits set for all 200K+ tokens vocabulary.

Re: A few words on DS4

#160
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always: it depends on your needs. Here's a very basic heuristics rundown: - More RAM: bigger models, more intelligence. - More FLOPs: higher pre-fill (reading large files and long prompts before answering, the so-called "time to first token"). - More RAM bandwidth: higher token generation (speed of output). So basically Macs (high RAM, okay bandwidth, lowish FLOPs) can run pretty intelligent models at an okay outp…

Do you think Apple will fix prefill speed with the M6 Max MacBook Ultra 128GB?

It's already greatly improved over previous generations due to M5s having tensor cores (higher compute capacity for matmul operations, the bottleneck for prefill).
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