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Running local models is good now

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Re: Running local models is good now

#121

Post by cyanydeez »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #41
StevenWaterman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> (starts to get a bit dumb above 160k ish) If open models can ever hold roughly 600k token windows, I'll be really excited, I found that around 300 ~ 400k of Claude reading through your codebase results in better outputs. I also have Claude read official docs instead of "guessing" as to how to do something.

I don't really think you're making reasonable decisions at that size; but I suppose if you're not allowed to refactor it, maybe.

I think the way these models work excludes sane behaviors the larger the context gets as each token introduces potential ambiguities between "USER" and "SYSTEM" messages leading to all the catastrophic behaviors.

Anyway, with AMD395+ I'm finding ~100k is both speed and context usefulness unless it's scoped tightly. with opencode, I manage it with dynamic context pruning: https://github.com/Opencode-DCP/opencode-dynamic-context-pru... ; then anything I touch ends up being refactored so context doesn't get bloated with unecessary functions, etc.

Obviously, this isn't compatible with certain business codebases, so I can see why bloat meets bloat.

Re: Running local models is good now

#122

Post by jstanley »

heipei wrote: post #114
c0rruptbytes wrote: post #104

I don't know about good, I use a lot of local models and they're still pretty painful to run locally You have dense models (qwen 27b, gemma 31b) who are pretty smart, but pretty slow You have MoE models (gemma 26b, qwen 35b, north mini code 30b) who are pretty fast, but make a lot of mistakes You need a lot of memory to run these well, quantization makes tool calling weaker, so most run at 4 bit quants and are wonder…

Depends on what you mean by "local". On your Macbook, large dense models like Qwen 3.6 27B will be slow, sure. On a local workstation with a dedicated RTX card you can get > 100 tps, which is more than good enough to work with it, and faster than cloud models in many cases.

But how smart is it? All the people running local models never seem to mention that they are way dumber than cloud models.

I don't care how many tokens per second of nonsense it can generate.

Re: Running local models is good now

#124

Post by celrod »

ggerganov wrote: post #83
hypfer wrote: 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,…

I haven't spent a dime on cloud inference, so cannot make a direct comparison like you. But I can 100% attest to the fact that Qwen3.6-27B is a very capable local model for coding tasks. Over the last month and a half I've been using it almost daily, either on my M2 Ultra or on my RTX 5090 box. I use it for small mundane tasks at ggml-org [0] - nothing really impressive, but definitely a helpful tool for a maintainer…

What quant do you run it at? 32GB seems like cutting it close on the rtx 5090 if going 8b, but other commenters are saying 4b lobotomizes the model.

Re: Running local models is good now

#125

Post by giancarlostoro »

whythismatters wrote: post #63
giancarlostoro wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a model on Huggingface where someone takes Qwen and makes it think Opus style, and that one seems to be decent, not sure if they have the 27B variant in that style. I do wonder if you can tweak your system prompt to force Qwen to behave better?

Yes, Qwopus :) I've been pleasantly surprised by its quality

Seen that one too, same guy I'm thinking of too, havent had a chance to try all of their models. For anyone curious I believe the username is Jackrong on huggingface? They've got several models out on there each focused on programming from different approaches.

Re: Running local models is good now

#126

Post by Barbing »

iagooar wrote: post #115

I love running two models locally: qwen3.6 27B 8bit (dense) and qwen3.6 35B 4bit (MoE). The 27B is the smarter, more reliable one - but it is slower. The 35B is faster, still very smart but below 27B, a bit less reliable. The reason is the MoE - Mixture of Experts architecture, which only activates a subset of parameters, making the model much much faster. I run the 27B on a MacBook Pro M5 Max + 40 GPU cores + 128GB…

Did you get a Brave search API key or something for that “Hermes”?

Re: Running local models is good now

#127

Post by sbmthakur »

rmunn wrote: 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…

Someone was able to run gemma-4-26B-A4B on an i5-8500 with 32 gb ram with NO GPU. Granted this is an extreme example these MoE models are value for money for a lot of use cases.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/YontVNVRbL

Re: Running local models is good now

#128

Post by illegalsmile »

epistasis wrote: post #85
hypfer wrote: 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,…

> talking just way too much OMG this is such an annoying property, just shut the hell up please, and be concise. I suspect that this is an artifact of the thinking property, but please just summarize the thinking process far more concisely, where a single sentence answer is more than sufficient the frontier models seem devoted to going on to a minimum of 5 paragraphs and offering 3-5 new directions. And requests to p…

That's why you have to give claude and others directives/.md at the beginning so it doesn't go off the deep end with suggestions.

Re: Running local models is good now

#129

Post by ltononro »

hypfer wrote: 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,…

Well but comparing with sonnet 4.6 instead of opus 4.6,.7 or .8 doesnt make a real point I mean, pay 200 USD/month (if you have that cash, or your company has it), might not justify using local at all (unless you have some reason to suspect about data leakage)

Re: Running local models is good now

#130

Post by dghlsakjg »

Scoundreller wrote: post #73
clickety_clack wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be very hard to convince someone to pay $100/mo to go back to Claude if they have a local model up and running, particularly now that model improvement has basically been stalled for the last 6 months. It’s so easy to set it up for yourself now too with things like LM studio. That said, there will always be unsophisticated users who can’t figure it out, so there will always be someone there to pay.

The third category are the occasional users that won’t have the hardware and won’t stomach a monthly fee for “unlimited” but are happy to pay-per-use. I’d think the volume for that category would be low but LLMs aren’t just for coding.

I’m probably the third category. I like experimenting and trying different models and techniques. I want api access for my own apps and Claude subscriptions don’t have that.

Sure I could splash out a ton of money for a high ram Mac, but deepseek is so dirt cheap that I think depreciation on a high end machine costs more than my api spend.

Example of what I’m using it for: building a semantic database of podcast content (podcast discoverability sucks on an episode level). I need a cheap LLM, an embedder, a transcriber, none of which Claude will do.

My api costs for coding agents plus running apps are about ~$20/month, but I get more than just chat + Claude code.

If all I was doing was pumping an employers codebase through a coding agent, Claude would be the answer.

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