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Running local models is good now

vickiboykis.com

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Re: Running local models is good now

#91
> I have a 2022 M2 Mac with 64 GB RAM

I closed the article after that.

The author has no idea what a privilege it is to have a machine like that for personal use, and how 99% of the population are not going to afford a setup like that.

Just some back-of-the-envelope maths will tell you that a $20/month Claude subscription makes much more sense financially.

Re: Running local models is good now

#92
post #38

I think gemma-4-26b-a4b and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B show that there's something very interesting about a local model that does mixture-of-experts (which helps a lot with performance) and has in the order of 30 billion parameters. These models are very capable, and use around 20-30GB of RAM while they are running. Provided you have 64GB of RAM that leaves space for running other applications at the same time.

Obtaining that 64GB RAM is a meaningful obstacle for many.

I'm still amazed that you can run LLMs of this quality on a machine that costs less than $3,000.

I used to assume that anything GPT-4 equivalent or higher would need $30,000+ of server-class hardware.

That said... gemma-4-12b-qat is 7.15GB on disk so should run reasonably well in 16GB, that takes it down to MacBook Air territory https://lmstudio.ai/models/google/gemma-4-12b-qat

Re: Running local models is good now

#93
post #7

This is the kind of thing that Anthropic et al should be worried about. As it becomes easier and easier to run local models, the ceiling of what they'll be able to charge will get lower and lower. Not that nobody will be willing to pay $$$$$ per month, but a lot of people are going to multiply the per-month charge by 12 or 24 and say "Could I set up a local model for less than that, and have it pay for itself within…

The opposite of that has been happening for 20 years now with cloud compute. It won't happen with AI models either. It's almost ingrained in the American business model now. Outsource everything. Nobody wants to manage a room full of servers when they can spend 2-3x as much and outsource that headache along with the responsibility for it. Same will happen with AI. Whether that means paying Anthropic that premium or p…

Still though, perhaps the existence of low-margin, generic, cloud LLM's puts some downward pressure on the 'brand name' companies?

Re: Running local models is good now

#94
post #88
post #15

After having been a happy user of Qwen3.6-27B for a few weeks, due to being away from the hardware, I'm currently forced to use Claude Sonnet 4.6 It is such a downgrade. I don't understand how that's even possible. The thing has so many strongly-held opinions I did not ever ask it for, talking just way too much and generally feeling somehow dumber. Of course, being significantly larger, it will encode more knowledge,…

what kind of hardware do you need in order to run qwen3.6-27b

I recommend MacBook M5 Max with 128 GB of RAM to run it comfortably and fast. If you have something like a regular M4, go with qwen3.6-35b-a3d - the Mixture of Expert architecture makes it run 2-3x faster than the 27b version.

Re: Running local models is good now

#95
post #11

The challenge I have is getting a large enough context window so tool calls work reliably, the local models easily slip into hallucinated JSON tool responses and won't trigger the tools as a result.

Same here. I'm curious what others loving Qwen are doing differently, because it constantly hits this issue for me. It's been great for autofilling blocks, but difficult for me to use agentically.

Re: Running local models is good now

#96
Is there a local harness designed around the local model use case that is claude code like? Opencode has been problematic at times, pi works for one off for me but not back and forth conversations with the LLM. Considering I only use Qwen or Gemma models I'm close to just writing my own at this point

Re: Running local models is good now

#97
post #15

After having been a happy user of Qwen3.6-27B for a few weeks, due to being away from the hardware, I'm currently forced to use Claude Sonnet 4.6 It is such a downgrade. I don't understand how that's even possible. The thing has so many strongly-held opinions I did not ever ask it for, talking just way too much and generally feeling somehow dumber. Of course, being significantly larger, it will encode more knowledge,…

Yep, I daily drive Qwen3.6-27B (including for work), have done pretty much since it came out. IMO it's the only (small-ish, local) model worth using, if you can run it. It might not be as good as Opus at "add X large feature" but I don't want that in a model. I want to do the thinking while it does the typing. And Qwen 3.6 27B is perfectly good at that (while in my experience models like the 35A3B and gemma are signi…

Just this morning I tweaked my single 3090 setup too:

  OLLAMA_FLASH_ATTENTION=1
  OLLAMA_KV_CACHE_TYPE=q8_0
  OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=180000
and that fits in 23GB.

[edited for format]

Re: Running local models is good now

#98
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same 24GB VRAM RTX 4090 I bought to play Cyberpunk 2077 with. Works perfectly fine in llama.cpp throwing 70+t/s at me with 128k q8 K/V context when using the IQ4_NL quant + MTP at q4 MTP K/V. Also leaving this here because you might find it useful: https://hypfer.github.io/will-it-fit-llama-cpp/

Nice! Do you do anything with that compute when you're not actively using it? Is the crypto-mining hobby still worth it? I've also wondered if such expensive hardware can be rented back out to offset cost. Looks like these cards are going for as much as $4k nowadays.

> I've also wondered if such expensive hardware can be rented back out to offset cost.

Massive legal liability. Not worth it.

Re: Running local models is good now

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite of that has been happening for 20 years now with cloud compute. It won't happen with AI models either. It's almost ingrained in the American business model now. Outsource everything. Nobody wants to manage a room full of servers when they can spend 2-3x as much and outsource that headache along with the responsibility for it. Same will happen with AI. Whether that means paying Anthropic that premium or p…

That's an interesting take, however there is no ongoing maintenance related to local models, maybe the only effort is giving more capable machines to the workforce; but yeah I can see how it might feel like a barrier.

The hardware, the power systems, the cooling systems. They need maintenance.

The OS needs updates, file systems get corrupted.

Fans get dirty.

All the things that you need to deal with in hosting your own server infrastructure you have to deal with when hosting your own AI infrastructure (which runs on servers...)

Re: Running local models is good now

#100
It's more than good. As of today, it's great. Those models listed in the blog are horrible compared to what you can run today, There's absolutely no reason to run those, you have Qwen3.6, Gemma4, and plenty other sized comparable models.

If you're resourceful, you can even run SOTA models. KimiK2.7, MiMo-V2.5/V2.5-Pro, MiniMax2.5/2.7/3, DeepSeekV3.1/v3.2/V4-Flash/V4Pro, GLM5.1, Step3.7-Flash, Qwen3.5-397B, Qwen3.5-122B, gpt-oss-120B

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