Comment by simonw 11 hours ago
This GGUF is 48.4GB - https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-Next-GGUF/tree/main/... - which should be usable on higher end laptops.
I still haven't experienced a local model that fits on my 64GB MacBook Pro and can run a coding agent like Codex CLI or Claude code well enough to be useful.
Maybe this will be the one? This Unsloth guide from a sibling comment suggests it might be: https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3-coder-next
You can run plenty of models on a $10K machine or even a lot less than that, it all depends how much you want to wait for results. Streaming weights from SSD storage using mmap() is already a reality when running the largest and sparsest models. You can save even more on memory by limiting KV caching at the cost of extra compute, and there may be ways to push RAM savings even higher simply by tweaking the extent to which model activations are recomputed as needed.
Yeah there's a lot of people that advocate for really slow inference on cheap infra. That's something else that should be expressed in this fidelity
Because honestly I don't care about 0.2 tps for my use cases although I've spoken with many who are fine with numbers like that.
At least the people I've talked to they talk about how if they have a very high confidence score that the model will succeed they don't mind the wait.
Essentially a task failure is 1 in 10, I want to monitor and retry.
If it's 1 in 1000, then I can walk away.
The reality is most people don't have a bearing on what this order of magnitude actually is for a given task. So unless you have high confidence in your confidence score, slow is useless
But sometimes you do...
For context on what cloud API costs look like when running coding agents:
With Claude Sonnet at $3/$15 per 1M tokens, a typical agent loop with ~2K input tokens and ~500 output per call, 5 LLM calls per task, and 20% retry overhead (common with tool use): you're looking at roughly $0.05-0.10 per agent task.
At 1K tasks/day that's ~$1.5K-3K/month in API spend.
The retry overhead is where the real costs hide. Most cost comparisons assume perfect execution, but tool-calling agents fail parsing, need validation retries, etc. I've seen retry rates push effective costs 40-60% above baseline projections.
Local models trading 50x slower inference for $0 marginal cost start looking very attractive for high-volume, latency-tolerant workloads.
On the other hand, Deepseek V3.2 is $0.38 per million tokens output. And on openrouter, most providers serve it at 20 tokens/sec.
At 20t/s over 1 month, that's... $19something running literally 24/7. In reality it'd be cheaper than that.
I bet you'd burn more than $20 in electricity with a beefy machine that can run Deepseek.
The economics of batch>1 inference does not go in favor of consumers.
I don't even need "open weights" to run on hardware I own.
I am fine renting an H100 (or whatever), as long as I theoretically have access to and own everything running.
I do not want my career to become dependent upon Anthropic.
Honestly, the best thing for "open" might be for us to build open pipes and services and models where we can rent cloud. Large models will outpace small models: LLMs, video models, "world" models, etc.
I'd even be fine time-sharing a running instance of a large model in a large cloud. As long as all the constituent pieces are open where I could (in theory) distill it, run it myself, spin up my own copy, etc.
I do not deny that big models are superior. But I worry about the power the large hyperscalers are getting while we focus on small "open" models that really can't match the big ones.
We should focus on competing with large models, not artisanal homebrew stuff that is irrelevant.
> I do not want my career to become dependent upon Anthropic
As someone who switches between Anthropic and ChatGPT depending on the month and has dabbled with other providers and some local LLMs, I think this fear is unfounded.
It's really easy to switch between models. The different models have some differences that you notice over time but the techniques you learn in one place aren't going to lock you into a provider anywhere.
> It's really easy to switch between models. The different models have some differences that you notice over time but the techniques you learn in one place aren't going to lock you into a provider anywhere.
We have two cell phone providers. Google is removing the ability to install binaries, and the other one has never allowed freedom. All computing is taxed, defaults are set to the incumbent monopolies. Searching, even for trademarks, is a forced bidding war. Businesses have to shed customer relationships, get poached on brand relationships, and jump through hoops week after week. The FTC/DOJ do nothing, and the EU hasn't done much either.
I can't even imagine what this will be like for engineering once this becomes necessary to do our jobs. We've been spoiled by not needing many tools - other industries, like medical or industrial research, tie their employment to a physical location and set of expensive industrial tools. You lose your job, you have to physically move - possibly to another state.
What happens when Anthropic and OpenAI ban you? Or decide to only sell to industry?
This is just the start - we're going to become more dependent upon these tools to the point we're serfs. We might have two choices, and that's demonstrably (with the current incumbency) not a good world.
Computing is quickly becoming a non-local phenomenon. Google and the platforms broke the dream of the open web. We're about to witness the death of the personal computer if we don't do anything about it.
OOM is a pretty terrible benchmark too, though. You can build a DDR4 machine that "technically" loads 256gb models for maybe $1000 used, but then you've got to account for the compute aspect and that's constrained by a number of different variables. A super-sparse model might run great on that DDR4 machine, whereas a 32b model would cause it to chug.
There's just not a good way to visualize the compute needed, with all the nuance that exists. I think that trying to create these abstractions are what leads to people impulse buying resource-constrained hardware and getting frustrated. The autoscalers have a huge advantage in this field that homelabbers will never be able to match.
> time-to-first-token/token-per-second/memory-used/total-time-of-test
Would it not help with the DDR4 example though if we had more "real world" tests?
Maybe, but even that fourth-order metric is missing key performance details like context length and model size/sparsity.
The bigger takeaway (IMO) is that there will never really be hardware that scales like Claude or ChatGPT does. I love local AI, but it stresses the fundamental limits of on-device compute.
I run Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct gguf on a VM with 13gb RAM and a 6gb RTX 2060 mobile GPU passed through to it with ik_llama, and I would describe it as usable, at least. It's running on an old (5 years, maybe more) Razer Blade laptop that has a broken display and 16gb RAM.
I use opencode and have done a few toy projects and little changes in small repositories and can get pretty speedy and stable experience up to a 64k context.
It would probably fall apart if I wanted to use it on larger projects, but I've often set tasks running on it, stepped away for an hour, and had a solution when I return. It's definitely useful for smaller project, scaffolding, basic bug fixes, extra UI tweaks etc.
I don't think "usable" a binary thing though. I know you write lot about this, but it'd be interesting to understand what you're asking the local models to do, and what is it about what they do that you consider unusable on a relative monster of a laptop?
I've had usable results with qwen3:30b, for what I was doing. There's definitely a knack to breaking the problem down enough for it.
What's interesting to me about this model is how good it allegedly is with no thinking mode. That's my main complaint about qwen3:30b, how verbose its reasoning is. For the size it's astonishing otherwise.
Honestly I've been completely spoiled by Claude Code and Codex CLI against hosted models.
I'm hoping for an experience where I can tell my computer to do a thing - write a code, check for logged errors, find something in a bunch of files - and I get an answer a few moments later.
Setting a task and then coming back to see if it worked an hour later is too much friction for me!
> I still haven't experienced a local model that fits on my 64GB MacBook Pro and can run a coding agent like Codex CLI or Claude code well enough to be useful
I've had mild success with GPT-OSS-120b (MXFP4, ends up taking ~66GB of VRAM for me with llama.cpp) and Codex.
I'm wondering if maybe one could crowdsource chat logs for GPT-OSS-120b running with Codex, then seed another post-training run to fine-tune the 20b variant with the good runs from 120b, if that'd make a big difference. Both models with the reasoning_effort set to high are actually quite good compared to other downloadable models, although the 120b is just about out of reach for 64GB so getting the 20b better for specific use cases seems like it'd be useful.
You are describing distillation, there are better ways to do it, and it was done in the past, Deepseek distilled onto Qwen.
Yeah, Apple hardware don't seem ideal for LLMs that are large, give it a go with a dedicated GPU if you're inclined and you'll see a big difference :)
What are some good GPUs to look for if you're getting started?
I configured Claude Code to use a local model (ollama run glm-4.7-flash) that runs really well on a 32G M2Pro macmini. Maybe my standards are too low, but I was using that combination to clean up the code, make improvements, and add docs and tests to a bunch of old git repo experiment projects.
Did you have to do anything special to get it to work? I tried and it would just bug out, things like respond with JSON strings summarizing what I asked of it or just outright getting things wrong entirely. For example, I asked it to summarize what a specific .js file did and it provided me with new code it made up based on the file name...
Why don't you try it out in Opencode? It's possible to hook up the openrouter api, and some providers have started to host it there [1]. It's not yet available in opencode's model list [2].
Opencode's /connect command has a big list of providers, openrouter is on there.
I wonder if the future in ~5 years is almost all local models? High-end computers and GPUs can already do it for decent models, but not sota models. 5 years is enough time to ramp up memory production, consumers to level-up their hardware, and models to optimize down to lower-end hardware while still being really good.
Opensource or local models will always heavily lag frontier.
Who pays for a free model? GPU training isn't free!
I remember early on people saying 100B+ models will run on your phone like nowish. They were completely wrong and I don't think it's going to ever really change.
People always will want the fastest, best, easiest setup method.
"Good enough" massively changes when your marketing team is managing k8s clusters with frontier systems in the near future.
I don't think this is as true as you think.
People do not care about the fastest and best past a point.
Let's use transportation as an analogy. If all you have is a horse, a car is a massive improvement. And when cars were just invented, a car with a 40mph top speed was a massive improvement over one with a 20mph top speed and everyone swapped.
While cars with 200mph top speeds exist, most people don't buy them. We all collectively decided that for most of us, most of the time, a top speed of 110-120 was plenty, and that envelope stopped being pushed for consumer vehicles.
If what currently takes Claude Opus 10 minutes to do can be done is 30ms, then making something that can do it in 20ms isn't going to be enough to get everyone to pay a bunch of extra money for.
Companies will buy the cheapest thing that meets their needs. SOTA models right now are much better than the previous generation but we have been seeing diminishing returns in the jump sizes with each of the last couple generations. If the gap between current and last gen shrinks enough, then people won't pay extra for current gen if they don't need it. Just like right now you might use Sonnet or Haiku if you don't think you need Opus.
This is the assumption of a hard plateu we can effectively optimize forever towards while possible we havn't seen it.
Again my point is "good enough" changes as possibilities open. Marketing teams running entire infra stacks is an insane idea today but may not be in the future.
You could easily code with a local model similar to gpt 4 or 3 now but I will 10-100x your performance with a frontier model and that will fundamentally not change.
Hmmm but maybe there's an argument of a static task. Once a model hits that ability of that specific task you can optimize it into a smaller model. So I guess I buy the argument for people working on statically capped conplexity tasks?
PII detection for example, a <500M model will outperform a 1-8B param model on that narrow task. But at the same time just a pii detection bot is not a product anymore. So yes a opensource one does it but as a result its fundamentally less valuable and I need to build higher and larger products for the value?
Gpt3.5 as used in the first commercially available chat gpt is believed to be hundreds of billions of parameters. There are now models I can run on my phone that feel like they have similar levels of capability.
Phones are never going to run the largest models locally because they just don't have the size, but we're seeing improvements in capability at small sizes over time that mean that you can run a model on your phone now that would have required hundreds of billions of parameters less than 6 years ago.
Sure but the moment you can use that small model locally its capabilities are no longer differntiated or valuable no?
I supose the future will look exacrly like now. Some mixture of local and non local.
I guess my argument is that market dominated by local doesn't seem right and I think the balance will look similar to what it is right now
The G in GPT stands for Generalized. You don't need that for specialist models, so the size can be much smaller. Even coding models are quite general as they don't focus on a language or a domain. I imagine a model specifically for something like React could be very effective with a couple of billion parameters, especially if it was a distill of a more general model.
I don't know about frontier, I code nowadays a lot using Opus 4.5, in a way that I instruct it to do something (like complex refactor etc) - I like that it's really good at actually doing what its told and only occasionally do I have to fight it when it goes off the rails. It also does not hallucinate all that much in my experience (Im writing Js, YMMV with other languages), and is good at spotting dumb mistakes.
That said, I'm not sure if this capability is only achievable in huge frontier models, I would be perfectly content using a model that can do this (acting as a force multiplier), and not much else.
I think we'll eventually find a way to make the cycle smaller, so instead of writing a stackoverflow post in 2024 and using a model trained on it in 2025 I'll be contributing to the expertise of a distributed-model-ish-thing on Monday and benefitting from that contribution on Tuesday.
When that happens, the most powerful AI will be whichever has the most virtuous cycles going with as wide a set of active users as possible. Free will be hard to compete with because raising the price will exclude the users that make it work.
Until then though, I think you're right that open will lag.
I'm hoping so. What's amazing is that with local models you don't suffer from what I call "usage anxiety" where I find myself saving my Claude usage for hypothetical more important things that may come up, or constantly adjusting prompts and doing some manual work myself to spare token usage.
Having this power locally means you can play around and experiment more without worries, it sounds like a wonderful future.
Plus a long queue of yet-undiscovered architectural improvements
I'm suprised there isn't more "hope" in this area. Even things like the GPT Pro models; surely that sort of reasoning/synthesis will eventually make its way into local models. And that's something that's already been discovered.
Just the other day I was reading a paper about ANNs whose connections aren't strictly feedforward but, rather, circular connections proliferate. It increases expressiveness at the (huge) cost of eliminating the current gradient descent algorithms. As compute gets cheaper and cheaper, these things will become feasible (greater expressiveness, after all, equates to greater intelligence).
That's a good point. I'm not familiar enough with the various moats to comment.
I was just talking at a high level. If transformers are HDD technology, maybe there's SSD right around the corner that's a paradigm shift for the whole industry (but for the average user just looks like better/smarter models). It's a very new field, and it's not unrealistic that major discoveries shake things up in the next decade or less.
A lot of manufacturers are bailing on consumer lines to focus on enterprise from what I've read. Not great.
Even without leveling up hardware, 5 years is a loooong time to squeeze the juice out of lower-end model capability. Although in this specific niche we do seem to be leaning on Qwen a lot.
I can't get Codex CLI or Claude Code to use small local models and to use tools. This is because those tools use XML and the small local models have JSON tool use baked into them. No amount of prompting can fix it.
In a day or two I'll release my answer to this problem. But, I'm curious, have you had a different experience where tool use works in one of these CLIs with a small local model?
You mean Qwen3-Coder-Next? I haven't tried that model itself, yet, because I assume it's too big for me. I have a modest 16GB MacBook Air so I'm restricted to really small stuff. I'm thinking about buying a machine with a GPU to run some of these.
Anywayz, maybe I should try some other models. The ones that haven't worked for tool calling, for me are:
Llama3.1
Llama3.2
Qwen2.5-coder
Qwen3-coder
All these in 7b, 8b, or sometimes 30b (painfully) models.
I should also note that I'm typically using Ollama. Maybe LM Studio or llama.cpp somehow improve on this?
Surely the answer is a very small proxy server between the two?
They run fairly well for me on my 128GB Framework Desktop.
what do you run this on if I may ask? lmstudio, ollama, lama? which cli?
Unfortunately Qwen3-next is not well supported on Apple silicon, it seems the Qwen team doesn't really care about Apple.
On M1 64GB Q4KM on llama.cpp gives only 20Tok/s while on MLX it is more than twice as fast. However, MLX has problems with kv cache consistency and especially with branching. So while in theory it is twice as fast as llama.cpp it often does the PP all over again which completely trashes performance especially with agentic coding.
So the agony is to decide whether to endure half the possible speed but getting much better kv-caching in return. Or to have twice the speed but then often you have again to sit through prompt processing.
But who knows, maybe Qwen gives them a hand? (hint,hint)
KV caching means that when you have 10k prompt, all follow up questions return immediately - this is standard with all inference engines.
Now if you are not happy with the last answer, you maybe want to simply regenerate it or change your last question - this is branching of the conversation. Llama.cpp is capable of re-using the KV cache up to that point while MLX does not (I am using MLX server from MLX community project). I haven't tried with LMStudio. Maybe worth a try, thanks for the heads-up.
It is the buffer implementation. [u1 10kTok]->[a1]->[u2]->[a2]. If you branch between the assistant1 and user2 answers then MLX does reprocess the u1 prompt of let's say 10k tokens while llama.cpp does not.
I just tested with GGUF and MLX of Qwen3-Coder-Next with llama.cpp and now with LMStudio. As I do branching very often, it is highly annoying for me to the point of being unusable. Q3-30B is much more usable then on Mac - but by far not as powerful.
There’s this issue/outstanding PR: https://github.com/lmstudio-ai/mlx-engine/pull/188#issuecomm...
It works reasonably well for general tasks, so we're definitely getting there! Probably Qwen3 CLI might be better suited, but haven't tested it yet.
I don't buy this. I've long wondered if the larger models, while exhibiting more useful knowledge, are not more wasteful as we greedily explore the frontier of "bigger is getting us better results, make it bigger". Qwen3-Coder-Next seems to be a point for that thought: we need to spend some time exploring what smaller models are capable of.
Perhaps I'm grossly wrong -- I guess time will tell.
You are not wrong, small models can be trained for niche use cases and there are lots of people and companies doing that. The problem is that you need one of those for each use case whereas the bigger models can cover a bigger problem space.
There is also the counter-intuitive phenomenon where training a model on a wider variety of content than apparently necessary for the task makes it better somehow. For example, models trained only on English content exhibit measurably worse performance at writing sensible English than those trained on a handful of languages, even when controlling for the size of the training set. It doesn't make sense to me, but it probably does to credentialed AI researchers who know what's going on under the hood.
Not an AI researcher and I don't really know, but intuitively it makes a lot of sense to me.
To do well as an LLM you want to end up with the weights that gets furthest in the direction of "reasoning".
So assume that with just one language there's a possibility to get stuck in local optima of weights that do well on the English test set but which doesn't reason well.
If you then take the same model size but it has to manage to learn several languages, with the same number of weights, this would eliminate a lot of those local optima because if you don't manage to get the weights into a regime where real reasoning/deeper concepts is "understood" then it's not possible to do well with several languages with the same number of weights.
And if you speak several languages that would naturally bring in more abstraction, that the concept of "cat" is different from the word "cat" in a given language, and so on.
Is that counterintuitive? If I had a model trained on 10 different programming languages, including my target language, I would expect it to do better than a model trained only on my target language, simply because it has access to so much more code/algorithms/examples then my language alone.
i.e. there is a lot of commonality between programming languages just as there is between human languages, so training on one language would be beneficial to competency in other languages.
> simply because it has access to so much more code/algorithms/examples then my language alone
I assumed that is what was catered for with "even when controlling for the size of the training set".
I.e. assuming I am reading it right: That it is better to get the same data as 25% in 4 languages, than 100% in one language.
There is (must be - information theory) a size/capacity efficiency frontier. There is no particular reason to think we're anywhere near it right now.
We need a new word, not "local model" but "my own computers model" CapEx based
This distinction is important because some "we support local model" tools have things like ollama orchestration or use the llama.cpp libraries to connect to models on the same physical machine.
That's not my definition of local. Mine is "local network". so call it the "LAN model" until we come up with something better. "Self-host" exists but this usually means more "open-weights" as opposed to clamping the performance of the model.
It should be defined as ~sub-$10k, using Steve Jobs megapenny unit.
Essentially classify things as how many megapennies of spend a machine is that won't OOM on it.
That's what I mean when I say local: running inference for 'free' somewhere on hardware I control that's at most single digit thousands of dollars. And if I was feeling fancy, could potentially fine-tune on the days scale.
A modern 5090 build-out with a threadripper, nvme, 256GB RAM, this will run you about 10k +/- 1k. The MLX route is about $6000 out the door after tax (m3-ultra 60 core with 256GB).
Lastly it's not just "number of parameters". Not all 32B Q4_K_M models load at the same rate or use the same amount of memory. The internal architecture matters and the active parameter count + quantization is becoming a poorer approximation given the SOTA innovations.
What might be needed is some standardized eval benchmark against standardized hardware classes with basic real world tasks like toolcalling, code generation, and document procesing. There's plenty of "good enough" models out there for a large category of every day tasks, now I want to find out what runs the best
Take a gen6 thinkpad P14s/macbook pro and a 5090/mac studio, run the benchmark and then we can say something like "time-to-first-token/token-per-second/memory-used/total-time-of-test" and rate this as independent from how accurate the model was.