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Practically ~20GB with KV cache

> We quantize weights to ~4-bit, bringing the LM under 20 GB. We validated minimal to no degradation on agentic tasks under compression.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vkgsum/introdu...

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I think if there's going to be advantages to making smaller, more targeted models, those advantages will probably come from targeting specific domains, not from targeting specific languages.

I think that if an LLM can't abstract over the differences between Python and C++, it probably will have an even harder time abstracting over the differences between writing code that manages a webserver, and writing code that does aerodynamic simulations.

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I am running it on a single RTX 3090 (24GB VRAM).

Some folks on Reddit are having the same experience: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vkm42m/muse_gl...

It uses an order of magnitude less VRAM at longer contexts which is a huge advantage over Qwen 3.6 27B

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Seems like that's the tradeoff with this model. Close to 27b intelligence while using less vram.
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Coming from the PC games industry in the 90s and early 2000s, it was a struggle to run some of the games on release. 90%* of people wouldn't be able to play the AAA games on release (think Crysis, etc). This period of local LLMs reminds me of that time, whereby the hardware just isn't there yet. Give it time, and the prices will drop.

* total guess

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Assuming we can even get the hardware in the first place, it might not even be possible for consumers to buy it at any price if it sells out through "agreements" made years in advance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045459
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I'm sooo happy I pulled the trigger on upgrading and getting a new laptop (with 64 GB RAM) last summer. Feels like it was just in time before the exponential price jumps.
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I kick myself a couple times a week for not getting the 512GB Mac Studio in February. I was holding out for an M4 or M5 chip...
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I was about a week away from buying a very tricked out MacBook Pro with 128 GB RAM, but was on vacation and worried about it arriving while I was away, and then the price hikes went into effect. Grumble. Oh, well. Serves me right.
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Lol, I still think about buying that now, even after the price hike. FOMO.
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I’m waiting for the bubble to pop. I suspect we’re 12-18 months away. We’re at the point where manufacturers are going out of business because the tech market is contracting so much. That’s not sustainable.
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Bought an M1 64 GB for 2000 euro’s second hand a year ago. That was sweet
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paid 2.7k € for this same build new in Dec 2023, that was also sweet (still is)
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Pulled the trigger?
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lol, you're right, the brainfart completely changes the meaning.

I corrected it.

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Common phrase.
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That commenter you're replying to knows that. The original commenter before them wrote "pulled the plug" which is different and doesn't quite apply here (actually implies the opposite of what they meant to say).
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Ah, the edit was fast enough not to leave a mark, leaving a conversation fragment that made me think OP was being weird about a gun related phrase or something
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Parent used "pulled the plug", are you saying it's applicable here and not "pulled the trigger" like suggested?
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There have been discussions on language specific not really being a relevant change to reduce size.
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I would love to see any good research projects about it but i have the feeling that Frontier with MoE is making too fast of a progress so that a customized model would always be worse and that the MoE part is actually going somehow in this direction.

On the other hand, at the GTC was a talk about coding in different lanugage (like spanish) and explaining that the quality between spanish and english is relevant different.

But i have not found a good article about the impact of learning data with practical experiments or even if the order of the learning data matters.

At least I think i remember that Meta mentioned having better and less data can be better than more data with lower quality.

As long as these models can explain to you facts about any other topics, its still overfitted for the task though.

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Capability in LLM's is distributed throughout the manifold in subspaces. Even worse, the subspaces exist in superposition.

That is to say, there is no single 'python' part of the model. The python bit is spread throughout the entire model and overlaps with other pieces that have similar, but unrelated, capabilities. For example the python subpspace might be partially in superposition with cupcake recipes, Esperanto, and calculus. We need calculus in a coding agent but not the other two. However, separating them cleanly is almost impossible, and even identifying them is tough.

Internally the manifolds are highly inefficient and nothing like you would imagine something humans built would be designed. It's more like something that evolved in nature.

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My current image from a MoE is that the base/core might be the more generic thing and that things like python are part of one expert though.
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With MOE you train a router designed to select which parts to activate. The router itself is a trained neural network and the 'experts' are usually not really things like 'python'. They're just the functional subspaces I described above.

Again, those subspaces are all somehow inextricably correlated and live in complex superposition spread throughout the manifold. The router doesn't know (or care) WHY those sections get lit up it just learns which ones to activate to optimize it's own reward function. So maybe it learns to activate "logic", "python" and "cupcake recipes in esperanto" whenever it see's something that kind of looks like python. It's not the best answer, it's just the best answer the tiny router could figure out.

It's all wildly complicated and inefficient, and works nothing like any reasonable human would imagine that it SHOULD operate.

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I mean the only way to separate them would be to separate them at training would it not? If there is zero python in the training set, then you have a smaller training set, should be able to have fewer weights in the model
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There was some paper about routing at training bio-knowledge into a particular region of the model, which you then can cutoff when serving. But you probably lose some efficiency since maybe you sized that region too small/too big.
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That's a very clever approach. Any idea about the papers title or authors? I'd love to look it up.
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Well if you're spending thousands on API tokens already, you could just drop the same amount on a 128GB MacBook Pro and that's a one time cost.
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If you're dropping thousands on API tokens, you're going to be slowed down at least 10x trying to do everything on a single MBP.
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But you could grab a 5090, and paired with some DRAM for MoE offloading of bigger models, and be a happy camper with 1.8TB/s of memory bandwidth.

Or just use Luna honestly. Worth considering if you’re ok with hosted APIs.

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Don't forget about energy usage, you'll probably never break even vs same model on openrouter.
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If you can’t do it cheaper on your own hardware it does make you wonder how much of the cost of inference those large LLM providers are eating? Datacenter hardware isn’t magic.
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Your personal hardware probably isn't running useful tasks 24/7. If you spend 60% of your 8h work day on full on agentic work, then your hardware is paying off for itself only 20% of available time.
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Datacenter hardware can batch at large scale, probably over 90% more energy efficient per token than a MacBook.
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Datacenter hardware might as well be magic compared to consumer. "Oh the F35 isn't magic compared to my M16 bro!"
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The models people are spending thousands on require more on the range of 600-800gb memory.

128gb hardly runs deepseek v4 flash which is almost free via api pricing.

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I feel like we’ve had this discussion before. From what I remember, specialized models rarely do that much better than general ones, hence no mode Codex models.
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There is no good reason to believe language-specific models are going to be any meaningfully smaller, just worse. Same as English-only models vs those trained on a multilingual corpus.
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> 64GB Macbook pro with an M5 chip costs more than 4k Euros in Germany

Sure, if you want the latest and almost* greatest. You can pick up an M1 Max 64GB for ~1k.

* I guess 128GB also exists

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The machines that can run this are pricey, but not beyond a high end developer machine.
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4K bucks buys you around 180 months of <insert AI subscription here> with zero upfront cost.
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Problem is that might go away or get nerfed.
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then you switch provider, it's not a monopoly
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If that happens you can still buy hardware later with almost certainly more (tok/s)/$ and better capabilities to run newer models more efficiently (remember native MXFP4?). Right now basically every generation of accelerator is adding new capabilities. These aren't yearly DirectX 9.0c-compatible GPU performance bumps.

As an individual, for average privacy needs (e.g. open source or at-home coding and automation), it's pretty much complete nonsense financially to self-host LLMs currently or select hardware now based on the capability to do so, and pay thousands of bucks extra.

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If you don't mind exfiltrating all your IP to the API provider
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Haha wow. I’m trying to even imagine the AI landscape in 15 years and I can’t.
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Instead of saying "I have a MBP with 64gb of RAM" you'll hear people say: "I'm subscribed to Model 9.x11B" and others will comment: "Oh dang, that's a nice model!"
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Even if you had a 64GB machine: Are you willing to reserve 90% of your memory to run a LLM? With dirt cheap models like deepseek-v4-flash that will run "forever" on $10, the answer for me is clearly: no.
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I'm waiting for the speed/quality per dollar metric to go down a little bit further and then I will def run it at home.

Its not just that you send a sentence to an API endpoint, you always send EVERYTHING to that agent as a context.

You want to analyse your spending history? You now send everything to someone.

Either no one cares but understands this implication on how easy it is to really capture you or no one really things about it.

But i'm a lot more diligent on what I send. I disabled the gemini activity feature for example because google started telling me that my stuff could be reviwed by humans.

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Yeah, it does feel a bit silly with my encrypted disks, encrypted backups, unique passwords, advanced router, etc, while I send everything I do in plain text to anthropic.
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Similiarly I wonder why we dont run our own email server despite the sensitive data there.
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I did, it started to become too much work to run it well due to all the spam :| (even with the right signatures and configs, until you learn what a blacklisted ip is and that ips need some time of 'positive history' and what not.....)

But at least with your email, you had to trust only one company, as shitty as it is.

Separation of concerns was also easy.

Now with OpenRouter, you just might by accident, send your whole context to just everyone because OpenRouter just routes to different models and you might just switch around between some free model, the good one etc. And it is always the whole context.

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"With dirt cheap models like deepseek-v4-flash that will run "forever" on $10, the answer for me is clearly: no."

When it's free, you are the product.

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Deepseek flash is open weight, this means we can download and run that model without any connection to deepseek, no data/tokens/usage data ever reaches them. They cannot make us their product.
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All those random api providers are absolutely scooping up your data though. And the hardware to run it locally is absurdly expensive.
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Running Ds flash at acceptable speeds is challenging unless you have several thousands of dollars to invest
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I see many people saying deepseek and other chinese providers have always been profitable. Also they show their training costs publicly. Can't say for sure since I have not used it personally, but I think they'll for sure outlive the western SOTAs.
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OpenAI apparently runs a profitable inference business with 40% gross margin, but their advertising budget is nutso and their real costs are pretraining and research. I suspect Deepseek's comp is not predicated on capturing the lightcone of all future value, some googling insinuates their top pay is $212K US which would support that suspicion. Compare and contrast with the $1.35M and up at OpenAI.
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Ah yes, I'm sure Trovalds and Stallman are harvesting my data through free software, aren't they? This argument is used by boomers who were fed cold war era propoganda that surely everybody is selfish, and you're always at fault.
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Think they're talking about things that are free as in beer but not free as in freedom, not FOSS
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It's the size of a big vm. There's nothing wrong with reserving that much working space for one item.
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I don't understand the desire to run own AI models for programming locally. No laptop is ever going to be as powerful and energy efficient to run anything close to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google models. A model you can run on a loptop is simply not going to work as well as it's needed for programming. Small models for linguistic work fine, but anything more sophisticated simply won't provide enough resources or power. Or models would need to be significantly dumbed down - then why use them at all? So far the idea of carrying a "thin" or "thin"-like device looks more reasonable to me, while running AI on your own server.
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> A model you can run on a loptop is simply not going to work as well as it's needed for programming

The models you can run on a high-spec laptop today are approximately where frontier models were 12-18mo ago (albeit at a lower tok/s rate). If you scan back through hn comments from that era, you’ll find plenty of people saying “this is powerful enough to massively increase my productivity”.

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> albeit at a lower tok/s rate

Not always! I get 80-100 tok/s from Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B on a MacBook Pro thanks to MTP. With long contexts that dips to around 50-60. However, prefill is much slower than API models. So it becomes really, really, really critical to not have cache misses.

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Slower is meaningfully dumber when you’re time bounded and need all the inference time compute you can get.
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I’m quite optimistic about the long-term future of local LLMs for privacy and cost control reasons. An LLM running on my own hardware, even if it’s not a laptop but a home server, is one where I don’t need to worry about token limits, token fees, privacy, and “rug-pulling” from the vendor.

In the short term, the big challenge is being able to afford hardware that can run a ~30B model. Last month I got to experiment with LLMs on a NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation as a visiting researcher during my summer break. I see the power of local LLMs for agentic coding; they’re no Claude, but they are quite useful. I wish I had gotten into local LLMs before hardware has gotten prohibitively expensive and in some cases unavailable; Apple discontinued certain Mac Minis and Mac Studios with high amounts of RAM due to the RAM shortage.

Hopefully high RAM prices don’t become a new normal, though the next year or two doesn’t look good.

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I've never done it but would be interested because it cuts out the burden of worrying about costs. Maybe I'm mistaken on energy cost here. There's a constant raincloud that follows me around regarding limits, and it would be nice to shake that.

I've been able to accomplish incredible feats (for myself) since GPT-4, so model intelligence is secondary.

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For some companies there might be a need to run them locally. For instance, Apple decided to run LLMs on the phone locally. I guess it depends on how important latency and privacy are. Perhaps Meta is looking at how much interest for those local models is there.
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> I don't understand the desire to run own AI models for programming locally.

Privacy. Security. Not bulk uploading your trade secrets and intellectual property to Sam and Dario’s servers.

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I was suggesting running personal AI servers.
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