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But the only cheap option is 16GB basic tier Mac Mini. That's not a lot of shared memory. Proces increase bery quickly for expanded memory models.
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Why though? The context window is 1 millions token max so far. That is what, a few MB of text? Sounds like I should be able to run claw on a raspberry pi.
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If you’re using it with a local model then you need a lot of GPU memory to load up the model. Unified memory is great here since you can basically use almost all the RAM to load the model.
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I meant cheap in the context of other Apple offerings. I think Mac Studios are a bit more expensive in comparable configurations and with laptops you also pay for the display.
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Local LLM is so utterly slow even with multiple $3,000+ modern GPUs operating in the giant context windows openclaw generally works with that I doubt anyone using it is doing so.

Local LLM from my basic messing around is a toy. I really wanted to make it work and was willing to invest 5 figures into it if my basic testing showed promise - but it’s utterly useless for the things I want to eventually bring to “prod” with such a setup. Largely live devops/sysadmin style tasking. I don’t want to mess around hyper-optimizing the LLM efficiency itself.

I’m still learning so perhaps I’m totally off base - happy to be corrected - but even if I was able to get a 50x performance increase at 50% of the LLM capabilities it would be a non-starter due to speed of iteration loops.

With opelclaw burning 20-50M/tokens a day with codex just during “playing around in my lab” stage I can’t see any local LLM short of multiple H200s or something being useful, even as I get more efficient with managing my context.

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Sure, but aren't most people running the *Claw projects using cloud inference?
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