> The warning I would have for everyone is to temper your expectations and read the fine print carefully. The big build in article starts off with a $40K budget and then includes 4 GPUs that are $12K each. For those doing the math, this build is going to cost more like 50-55K.

> Local setups also often rely on quantization and techniques like REAP to fit the models on their hardware.

This seems to ignore the very real possibility of running SOTA models at full precision on ordinary local hardware using SSD offload. Yes this will be slow and usually have very low throughput (even batched decode can only achieve so much before power and thermal limits become important, and that still leaves you with slow prefill as a major bottleneck) but that's OK if you aren't expecting a real-time response to begin with and your volumes as a single user are low enough.

This is similar to my experience with (8-bit quantized, non-MOE, 26b) Qwen locally on my computer. It’s really good for small tasks, but the first time I tried to do a major task with it it straight up forgot what agent harness it was in and started using the wrong format for tool calls lol

(If you’re curious, it was running in Pi, but somehow convinced itself it was running in Claude instead and started trying to call Claude tools that didn’t exist)

I’ve found ds4 on my mbp to be very useful, bought before ram prices became insane. It’s not writing entire applications on it’s own, it has resolved annoying networking issues on my tailnet that I had neither the time nor inclination to figure out on my own and I often find myself reaching for it for simple but annoyingly research intensive tasks that I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to. Is it opus? No, but is it useful? absolutely and I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’m getting value out of a subscription or the api cost of using it.

Wonder if AMD MI350P release will affect setups like this. From what I've heard, the price will be pretty similar to RTX PRO 6000 while having 50% more VRAM which is additionally an HBM3E instead of GDDR7.

They do say the cards were purchased when they were cheaper. They debuted at less than nine grand apparently.

Well you could make a REAP with better input prompts on longer context then. It’ll improve the REAP quality

All very true. Right now, running GLM 5.2 at its full BF16 quantization level needs 1.5 TB of VRAM. You can't run this locally at a usable speed for less than $250K or so, and frankly I'd be surprised if it could be done for less than $500K.

The best NV4FP quant for 5.2 appears to be lukealonso's at https://huggingface.co/lukealonso/GLM-5.2-NVFP4, and it is capable of good throughput (75-100 tps) without losing much reasoning performance. Allowing for overhead for the KV cache and other requirements, this quant will (barely) run in 8-way tensor-parallel mode on 8x RTX 6000 cards. Not too long ago it was possible to put an 8x machine together for less than $100K USD, but that's probably not true now, assuming you buy all-new components.

It'll almost certainly be worth it, given the abusive behavior we've seen and will continue to see from the major closed-model providers. If I hadn't already put a similar rig together, I'd be kicking myself. But getting it running well is by no means as simple as buying a bunch of RTX6K cards and calling it a day, and people need to know what they're getting into.

Local AI is in its Altair and IMSAI days. There's no turnkey Apple II or C64 on the market yet, much less an IBM PC. Hardware, yes -- you can buy a capable box off the shelf from various vendors -- but you have to be prepared to take up a whole new hobby when it comes to getting a complete system working well.