Anyway, you don't really need a lot of fast RAM unless you insist on getting a real-time usable response. If you're fine with running a "good" model overnight or thereabouts, there are things you can do to get better use of fairly low-end hardware.
What sort of specs do you need?
Question is whether models will keep getting bigger. If useful model sizes plateau eventually a good model becomes something at least many people can easily run locally. If models keep usefully growing this doesn’t happen.
The largest ones I see are in the 405g range which quantized fits in 256g RAM.
Long term I expect custom hardware accelerators designed specifically for LLMs to show up, basically an ASIC. If those got affordable I could see little USB-C accelerator boxes being under $1k able to run huge LLMs fast and with less power.
GPUs are most efficient for batch inference which lends itself to hosting not local use. What I mean is a lighter chip made to run small or single batch inference very fast using less power. The bottleneck there is memory bandwidth so I suspect fast RAM would be most of the cost of such a device. Small or single batch inference is memory bandwidth bound.
A complementary challenge is the knowledge layer: making the AI aware of your personal data (emails, notes, files) via RAG. As soon as you try this on a large scale, storage becomes a massive bottleneck. A vector database for years of emails can easily exceed 50GB.
(Full disclosure: I'm part of the team at Berkeley that tackled this). We built LEANN, a vector index that cuts storage by ~97% by not storing the embeddings at all. It makes indexing your entire digital life locally actually feasible.
Combining a local execution engine like this with a hyper-efficient knowledge index like LEANN feels like the real path to a true "local Jarvis."
Code: https://github.com/yichuan-w/LEANN Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08051
In 2025 I would consider this a relatively meager requirement.
However, the 50GB figure was just a starting point for emails. A true "local Jarvis," would need to index everything: all your code repositories, documents, notes, and chat histories. That raw data can easily be hundreds of gigabytes.
For a 200GB text corpus, a traditional vector index can swell to >500GB. At that point, it's no longer a "meager" requirement. It becomes a heavy "tax" on your primary drive, which is often non-upgradable on modern laptops.
The goal for practical local AI shouldn't just be that it's possible, but that it's also lightweight and sustainable. That's the problem we focused on: making a comprehensive local knowledge base feasible without forcing users to dedicate half their SSD to a single index.
Also, with many games and dual boot on my gaming PC I still have some space left on my 2TB NVME SSD. And my not enthusiast MOBO could fit two more.
It took so much time to install LaTeX and packages, and also so much space, my 128GB drive couldn't handle it.
A basic macbook can run gpt-oss-20b and it's quite useful for many tasks. And fast. Of course Macs have a huge advantage for local LLMs inference due to their shared memory architecture.
The bottom tier (not meant disparagingly) are people running diffusion models as these do not have the high vram requirements. They generate tons of images or video, going form a one-click instally like Easydiffusion to very sophisticated workflows in comfyui.
For those going the LLM route, which would be your target audience, they quickly run into the problemm that to go beyond toying around, the hardware and software requirements and expertise grows exponential beyong just toying around with small, highly quantized model with small context windows.
Inlight of the typical enthusiast investments in this space, the few TB of fast storage will pale in comparison to the rest of the expenses.
Again, your work is absolutely valuable, it is just that the storage space requirement for the vector store in this particular scenario is not your strongest card to play.
It's a breath of fresh air anytime someone finds a way to do more with less rather than just wait for things to get faster and cheaper.
All I tried to convey was that for most of the people in the presented scenario (personal emails etc.) , a 50 or even 500GB storage requirement is not going to be that primary constraint. So the suggestion was the marketing for this usecase might be better spotlighting also something else.
Same way you might have a 50TB relational database but “select id, name from people where country=‘uk’ and name like ‘benj%’ might only touch a few MB of storage at most.
Maybe Im too old to appreciate what “fast” means, but storage doesnt seem an enormous cost once you stripe it.
I think you meant this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08276
Having locally distributed similar grounds is one thing. Push everyone to much in its own information bubble, is an other orthogonal topic.
When someone mind recall about that email from years before, having the option to find it again in a few instants can interesting. But when the device is starting to funnel you through past traces, then it doesn't matter much whether it the solution is in local or remote: the spontaneous thought flow is hijacked.
In mindset dystopia, the device prompts you.
I am particularly excited about using RAG as the knowledge layer for LLM agents/pipelines/execution engines to make it feasible for LLMs to work with large codebases. It seems like the current solution is already worth a try. It really makes it easier that your RAG solution already has Claude Code integration![1]
Has anyone tried the above challenge (RAG + some LLM for working with large codebases)? I'm very curious how it goes (thinking it may require some careful system-prompting to push agent to make heavy use of RAG index/graph/KB, but that is fine).
I think I'll give it a try later (using cloud frontier model for LLM though, for now...)
[1]: https://github.com/yichuan-w/LEANN/blob/main/packages/leann-...
I'd still take a Docker container over an Apple container, because even though docker is not VM-level-secure, it's good enough for running local AI generated code. You don't need DEFCON Las Vegas levels of security for that.
And also because Docker runs on my windows gaming machine with a fast GPU with WSL ubuntu, and my linux VPS in the cloud running my website, etc etc. And most people have already memorized all the basic Docker commands.
This would be a LOT better if it was just a single docker command we can copy paste, run it a few times, and then delete if necessary.
This shows how little native app training data is even available.
People rarely write blog posts about designing native apps, long winded medium tutorials don't exist, heck even the number of open source projects for native desktop apps is a small percentage compared to mobile and web apps.
Historically Microsoft paid some of the best technical writers in the world to write amazing books on how to code for Windows (see: Charles Petzold), but now days that entire industry is almost dead.
These types of holes in training data are going to be a larger and larger problem.
Although this is just representative of software engineering in general - few people want to write native desktop apps because it is a career dead end. Back in the 90s knowing how to write Windows desktop apps was great, it was pretty much a promised middle class lifestyle with a pretty large barrier to entry (C/C++ programming was hard, the Windows APIs were not easy to learn, even though MS dumped tons of money into training programs), but things have changed a lot. Outside of the OS vendors themselves (Microsoft, Apple) and a few legacy app teams (Adobe, Autodesk, etc), very few jobs exist for writing desktop apps.
It's a lot better on battery life and superior experience, especially if you are traveling or around areas with bad cell service.
Cookies track me around on websites all the time + modern telemetry is pretty crazy.
The parent is talking about privacy and your first counter argument is privacy irrelevant battery life?
The tracking and telemetry abundance in native far exceeds the browser. Nevermind a lot of apps remain running in background because the user forgets or can't be bothered to close them.
Follow the money. Why are random companies begging me to download their mobile app and get ridiculous discounts in the process whenever I use their website? Why are weather apps known to be spyware vectors but weather websites don't have that stigma?
Qt is such a pain to work with it's almost like it's intentional that people should avoid it.
I think there’s room for an integrated solution with all the features we’re used to from commercial solutions: Web search (most important to me), voice mode (very handy), image recognition (useful in some cases), the killer feature being RAG on personal files.
I tried doing it with using Huggingface and Unsloth but keep getting OOM errors.
Have anyone done this that runs locally against your own data?
Its just more freedom and privacy in that matter.
Yeah, about that. They even illegally torrented entire databases, hide their crawlers. Crawl entire newspaper archives without permission. They didn't respect the rights of big media companies. But they're going to respect the little guy's of course because it says to in the T&Cs. Uh-huh.
Also, openai already admitted that they do store "deleted" content and temporary chats.
Then it will cause an insane backlash and nobody would use the product. So it is in their interest to not train/record.
But yes I also agree with you. They are already torrenting :/ So pretty sure if they can do illegal stuff scott free, they might do this too idk,
And yeah this was why I was actually saying that local matters more tbh. You just get rid of such headache.
I don't think there would be that much backlash. People are getting hooked on it and many don't actually care about privacy.
We know about Google, meta and people still use them. Not a big dent in openai usage either since their revelations.
But I understand your point!
But I still hope that we can someday actually have some meaningful improvements in speed too. Diffusion models seem to be really fast in architecture.
Unil a judge says they must log everything, indefinitely
And "good" is still questionable. The thing that makes this stuff useful is when it works instantly like magic. Once you find yourself fiddling around with subpar results at slower speeds, essentially all of the value is gone. Local models have come a long way but there is still nothing even close to Claude levels when it comes to coding. I just tried taking the latest Qwen and GLM models for a spin through OpenRouter with Cline recently and they feel roughly on par with Claude 3.0. Benchmarks are one thing, but reality is a completely different story.
Similar to a `docker compose up -d` that a lot of projects offer. Just download the docker-compose.yml file into a folder, run the command, and you're running. If you want to delete everything, just `docker compose down` and delete the folder, and the container and everything is gone.
Anything similar to that? I don't want to run a random install.sh on my machine that does god knows what.
container image pull instavm/coderunner
container run --name coderunner --detach instavm/coderunner
Frontend (coderunner-ui) is not inside a docker as of now.
Also - podman?
The previous commenter said that they didn't want to run a shell script that does "god knows what". The implication being that they would not trust the writer of the shell script.
They wanted a docker container that would setup this offline AI workspace for them, presumably so they could interact with the AI and feed "secrets" or otherwise private data into it. Obviously there are other use cases for an offline AI, but folks tend to let their guard down when they think something is offline-only, and they may not be as careful with .env values, or personal information, as they would with a SaaS frontier model.
So I was pointing out that the contents of the docker container would be also doing "god knows what" with their data. Sure they would get the offline user experience but then what happens? More shell scripts? Background data calls? etc. And of course it depends on how they configure their docker container, but if they aren't willing to review an install shell script, they probably aren't looking to do any level of effort for configuring Docker.
Hopefully that clarifies it.
I'm working on something similar focused on being able to easily jump between the two (cloud and fully local) using a Bring Your Own [API] Key model – all data/config/settings/prompts are fully stored locally and provider API calls are routed directly (never pass through our servers). Currently using mlc-llm for models & inference fully local in the browser (Qwen3-1.7b has been working great)
From the product homepage, I imagine you're running VMs in the cloud (a la Firecracker).
From the blog post though, it looks like you're running Apple-specific VMs for local execution?
As someone who's built the former, I'd love the latter for use with the new gpt-oss releases :)
As the hardware continues to iterate at a rapid pace, anything you pick up second-hand will still deprecate at that pace, making any real investment in hardware unjustifiable.
Coupled with the dramatically inferior performance of the weights you would be running in a local environment, it's just not worth it.
I expect this will change in the future, and am excited to invest in a local inference stack when the weights become available. Until then, you're idling a relatively expensive, rapidly depreciating asset.
However every time I run local models on my MacBook Pro with a ton of RAM, I’m reminded of the gap between local hosted models and the frontier models that I can get for $20/month or nominal price per token from different providers. The difference in speed and quality is massive.
The current local models are very impressive, but they’re still a big step behind the SaaS frontier models. I feel like the benchmark charts don’t capture this gap well, presumably because the models are trained to perform well on those benchmarks.
I already find the frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic to be slow and frequently error prone, so dropping speed and quality even further isn’t attractive.
I agree that it’s fun as a hobby or for people who can’t or won’t take any privacy risks. For me, I’d rather wait and see what an M5 or M6 MacBook Pro with 128GB of RAM can do before I start trying to put together another dedicated purchase for LLMs.
And there are plenty of ways to fit these models! A Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 512 GB unified memory though has huge capacity, and a decent chunk of bandwidth (800GB/s. Compare vs a 5090's ~1800GB/s). $10k is a lot of money, but that ability to fit these very large models & get quality results is very impressive. Performance is even less, but a single AMD Turin chip with it's 12-channels DDR5-6000 can get you to almost 600GB/s: a 12x 64GB (768GB) build is gonna be $4000+ in ram costs, plus $4800 for for example a 48 core Turin to go with it. (But if you go to older generations, affordability goes way up! Special part, but the 48-core 7R13 is <$1000).
Still, those costs come to $5000 at the low end. And come with much less token/s. The "grid compute" "utility compute" "cloud compute" model of getting work done on a hot gpu with a model already on it by someone else is very very direct & clear. And are very big investments. It's just not likely any of us will have anything but burst demands for GPUs, so structurally it makes sense. But it really feels like there's only small things getting in the way of running big models at home!
Strix Halo is kind of close. 96GB usable memory isn't quite enough to really do the thing though (and only 256GB/s). Even if/when they put the new 64GB DDR5 onto the platform (for 256GB, lets say 224 usable), one still has to sacrifice quality some to fit 400B+ models. Next gen Medusa Halo is not coming for a while, but goes from 4->6 channels, so 384GB total: not bad.
(It sucks that PCIe is so slow. PCIe 5.0 is only 64GB/s one-direction. Compared to the need here, it's no-where near enough to have a big memory host and smaller memory gpu)
You can find all of the open models hosted across different providers. You can pay per token to try them out.
I just don't see the open models as being at the same quality level as the best from Anthropic and OpenAI. They're good but in my experience they're not as good as the benchmarks would suggest.
> $10k is a lot of money, but that ability to fit these very large models & get quality results is very impressive.
This is why I only appreciate the local LLM scene from a distance.
It’s really cool that this can be done, but $10K to run lower quality models at slower speeds is a hard sell. I can rent a lot of hours on an on-demand cloud server for a lot less than that price or I can pay $20-$200/month and get great performance and good quality from Anthropic.
I think the local LLM scene is fun where it intersects with hardware I would buy anyway (MacBook Pro with a lot of RAM) but spending $10K to run open models locally is a very expensive hobby.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250516041637/https://www.anand...
I don't think that's a likely future, when you consider all the big players doing enormous infrastructure projects and the money that this increasingly demands. Powerful LLMs are simply not a great open source candidate. The models are not a by-product of the bigger thing you do. They are the bigger thing. Open sourcing a LLM means you are essentially investing money to just give it away. That simply does not make a lot of sense from a business perspective. You can do that in a limited fashion for a limited time, for example when you are scaling or it's not really your core business and you just write it off as expenses, while you try to figure yet another thing out (looking at you Meta).
But with the current paradigm, one thing seems to be very clear: Building and running ever bigger LLMs is a money burning machine the likes of which we have rarely or ever seen, and operating that machine at a loss will make you run out of any amount of money really, really fast.
From 2003-2016, 13 years, we had PCIE 1,2,3.
2017 - PCIE 4.0
2019 - PCIE 5.0
2022 - PCIE 6.0
2025 - PCIE 7.0
2028 - PCIE 8.0
Manufacturing and vendors are having a hard time keeping up. And the PCIE 5.0 memory is.. not always the most stable.
I'm saying we're due for faster memory but seem to be having trouble scaling bus speeds as well (in production) and reliable memory. And the network is changing a lot, too.
It's a neverending cycle I guess.
There's been a huge lag for PCIe adoption, and imo so so much has boiled down "do people need it"?
In the past 10 years I feel like my eyes have been opened that every high tech company's greatest highest most compelling desire is to slow walk the release out. To move as slow as the market will bear, to do as little as possible, to roll on and on with minor incremental changes.
There are canonball moments where the market is disrupted. Thank the fucking stars Intel got sick of all this shit and worked hard (with many others) to standardized NVMe, to make a post SATA world with higher speeds & better protocol. AMD64 architecture changed the game. Ryzen again. But so much of the industry is about retaining your cost advantage, is about retaining strong market segmentations, by never shipping too many PCIe lane platforms, by limiting consumer vs workstation vs server video card ram and vgpu (and mxgpu) and display out capabilities often entirely artificially.
But there is a fucking fire right now and everyone knows it. Nvlink is massively more bandwidth and massively more efficient and is essential to system performance. The need to get better fast is so on. Seems like for now SSD will keep slow walking their 2x's. But PCIe is facing a real crisis of being replaced, and everyone wants better. And hates hates hates the insane cost. PCIe 8.0 is going to be insane data to push over a differential, insane speed. But we have to.
Alas PCIe is also hampered by relatively generous broader system design. The trace distances are going to shrink, signal requirements increase a lot. But this needing a intercompatible compliance program for any peripheral to work is a significant disadvantage, versus, just make this point to point link work between these two cards.
There's so many energies happening right now in interconnect. I hope we see some actual uptake, some day. We've had so long for Gen-Z (Ethernet phy, gone now), CXL (3.x being switched, still un-arriced), now UltraEthernet and UltraLink. Man I hope we can see some step improvements. Everyone knows we are in deep shit if NV alone can connect systems. Ironically AMD's HyperTransport was open, was a path towards this, but now Infinity Fabric is an internal only thing and as branding & an idea vanishing from the world kind of, feels insufficient.
Is there any desire for most people? What's the TAM?
The addressable market depends on the advantage. Which right now: we don't know. It's all a guess that someone is going to find it valuable, and no one knows.
But if we find that we didn't actually need $700 NIC's to get shitty bandwidth, if we could have just been putting cables from PCIe shaped slot to PCIe slot (or oculink port!) and getting >>10x performance with >>10x less latency? Yeah bro uhh I think there might be a desire for using the same fucking chip we already use but getting 10x + 10x better out of it.
Faster lower latency cheaper storage? RAM expandability? Lower latency GPU access? There's so much that could make a huge difference for computing, broadly.
But as long as you are happy to keep running the same model, the wins here for large capacity & high bandwidth are sick ! And the affordability could be exceptional! (If you can afford to make flash with a hundred or so channels at a decent price!)
So that’s a real brick wall for a lot of people. It doesn’t matter how smart a local model is if it can’t put that smartness to work because it can’t touch anything. The difference between manually copy/pasting code from LM Studio and having an assistant that can read and respond to errors in log files is light years. So until this situation changes, this asterisk needs to be mentioned every time someone says “You can run coding models on a MacBook!”
I'm working on solving this problem in two steps. The first is a library prefilled-json, that lets small models properly fill out JSON objects. The second is a unpublished library called Ultra Small Tool Call that presents tools in a way that small models can understand, and basically walks the model through filling out the tool call with the help of prefilled-json. It'll combine a number of techniques, including tool call RAG (pulls in tool definitions using RAG) and, honestly, just not throwing entire JSON schemas at the model but instead using context engineering to keep the model focused.
IMHO the better solution for local on device workflows would be if someone trained a custom small parameter model that just determined if a tool call was needed and if so which tool.
I have a ton of respect for SGLang as a runtime. I'm hoping something can be done there. https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang/discussions/4461 . As noted in that thread, it is really great that Qwen3-Coder has a tool-parser built-in: hopefully can be some kind useful reference/start. https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct/b...
I have tried Cursor a bit, and whatever it used worked somewhat alright to generate a starting point for a feature and for a large refactor and break through writer's blocks. It was fun to see it behave similarly to my workflow by creating step-by-step plans before doing work, then searching for functions to look for locations and change stuff. I feel like one could learn structured thinking approaches from looking at these agentic AI logs. There were lots of issues with both of these tasks, though, e.g., many missed locations for the refactor and spuriously deleted or indented code, but it was a starting point and somewhat workable with git. The refactoring usage caused me to reach free token limits in only two days. Based on the usage, it used millions of tokens in minutes, only rarely less than 100K tokens per request, and therefore probably needs a similarly large context length for best performance.
I wanted to replicate this with VSCodium and Cline or Continue because I want to use it without exfiltrating all my data to megacorps as payment and use it to work on non-open-source projects, and maybe even use it offline. Having Cursor start indexing everything, including possibly private data, in the project folder as soon as it starts, left a bad taste, as useful as it is. But, I quickly ran into context length problems with Cline, and Continue does not seem to work very well. Some models did not work at all, DeepSeek was thinking for hours in loops (default temperature too high, should supposedly be <0.5). And even after getting tool use to work somewhat with qwen qwq 32B Q4, it feels like it does not have a full view of the codebase, even though it has been indexed. For one refactor request mentioning names from the project, it started by doing useless web searches. It might also be a context length issue. But larger contexts really eat up memory.
I am also contemplating a new system for local AI, but it is really hard to decide. You have the choice between fast GPU inference, e.g., RTX 5090 if you have money, or 1-2 used RTX 3090, or slow, but qualitatively better CPU / unified memory integrated GPU inference with systems such as the DGX Spark, the Framework Desktop AMD Ryzen AI Max, or the Mac Pro systems. Neither is ideal (and cheap). Although my problems with context length and low-performing agentic models seem to indicate that going for the slower but more helpful models on a large unified memory seems to be better for my use case. My use case would mostly be agentic coding. Code completion does not seem to fit me because I find it distracting, and I don't require much boilerplating.
It also feels like the GPU is wasted, and local inference might be a red herring altogether. Looking at how a batch size of 1 is one of the worst cases for GPU computation and how it would only be used in bursts, any cloud solution will be easily an order of magnitude or two more efficient because of these, if I understand this correctly. Maybe local inference will therefore never fully take off, barring even more specialized hardware or hard requirements on privacy, e.g., for companies. To solve that, it would take something like computing on encrypted data, which seems impossible.
Then again, if the batch size of 1 is indeed so bad as I think it to be, then maybe simply generate a batch of results in parallel and choose the best of the answers? Maybe this is not a thing because it would increase memory usage even more.
At small contexts with llama.cpp on my M4 Max, I get 90+ tokens/sec generation and 800+ tokens/sec prompt processing. Even at large contexts like 50k tokens, I still get fairly usable speeds (22 tok/s generation).
The real limit is on the Nvidia cards. They are cut down a fair bit, often with less VRAM until you really go up in price point.
They also come with NPUs but the docs are bad and none of the local LLM inference engines seem to use the NPU, even though they could in theory be happy running smaller models.
Even M1 MBP 32GB performance is pretty impressive for its age and you can get them for well <$1K second hand.
I have one.
I use these models: gpt-oss, llama3.2, deepseek, granite3.3
They all work fine and speed is not an issue. The recent Ollama app means I can have document/image processing with the LLM as well.
I take my laptop back and forth from home to work. At work, I ban them from in-person meetings because I want people to actually pay attention to the meeting. In both locations where I use the computer, I have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse I'm plugging in via a dock. That makes the built-in battery and I/O redundant. I think I would rather have a lower-powered, high-battery, ultra portable laptop remoting into the desktop for the few times I bring my computer to in-person meetings for demos.
I wish the memory bandwidth for eGPUs was better.
There are extremely few things that I cannot do on my laptop, and I have very little interest in those things. Why should I get a computer that doesn't have a screen? You do realize that, at this point of technological progress, the computer being attached to a keyboard and a screen is the only true distinguishing factor of a laptop, right?
Can you explain your rationale? It seems that the worst case scenario is that your setup might not be the most performant ever, but it will still work and run models just as it always did.
This sounds like a classical and very basic opex vs capex tradeoff analysis, and these are renowned for showing that on financial terms cloud providers are a preferable option only in a very specific corner case: short-term investment to jump-start infrastructure when you do not know your scaling needs. This is not the case for LLMs.
OP seems to have invested around $600. This is around 3 months worth of an equivalent EC2 instance. Knowing this, can you support your rationale with numbers?
Open models are trained on modern hardware and will continue to take advantage of cutting edge numeric types, and older hardware will continue to suffer worse performance and larger memory requirements.
That's fine. The point is that yesterday's hardware is quite capable of running yesterday's models, and obviously it will also run tomorrow's models.
So the question is cost. Capex vs opex. The fact is that buying your own hardware is proven to be far more cost-effective than paying cloud providers to rent some cycles.
I brought data to the discussion: for the price tag of OP's home lab, you only afford around 3 months worth of an equivalent EC2 instance. What's your counter argument?
You're right about the cost question, but I think the added dimension that people are worried about is the current pace of change.
To abuse the idiom a bit, yesterday's hardware should be able to run tomorrow's models, as you say, but it might not be able to run next month's models (acceptably or at all).
Fast-forward some number of years, as the pace slows. Then-yesterday's hardware might still be able to run next-next year's models acceptably, and someone might find that hardware to be a better, safer, longer-term investment.
I think of this similarly to how the pace of mobile phone development has changed over time. In 2010 it was somewhat reasonable to want to upgrade your smartphone every two years or so: every year the newer flagship models were actually significantly faster than the previous year, and you could tell that the new OS versions would run slower on your not-quite-new-anymore phone, and even some apps might not perform as well. But today in 2025? I expect to have my current phone for 6-7 years (as long as Google keeps releasing updates for it) before upgrading. LLM development over time may follow at least a superficially similar curve.
Regarding the equivalent EC2 instance, I'm not comparing it to the cost of a homelab, I'm comparing it to the cost of an Anthropic Pro or Max subscription. I can't justify the cost of a homelab (the capex, plus the opex of electricity, which is expensive where I live), when in a year that hardware might be showing its age, and in two years might not meet my (future) needs. And if I can't justify spending the homelab cost every two years, I certainly can't justify spending that same amount in 3 months for EC2.
I repeat: OP's home server costs as much as a few months of a cloud provider's infrastructure.
To put it another way, OP can buy brand new hardware a few times per year and still save money compared with paying a cloud provider for equivalent hardware.
> Regarding the equivalent EC2 instance, I'm not comparing it to the cost of a homelab, I'm comparing it to the cost of an Anthropic Pro or Max subscription.
OP stated quite clearly their goal was to run models locally.
Fair, but at the point you trust Amazon hosting your "local" LLM, its not a huge reach to just use Amazon Bedrock or something
I don't think you even bothered to look at Amazon Bedrock's pricing before doing that suggestion. They charge users per input tokens + output tokens. In Amazon Bedrock, a single chat session involving 100k tokens can cost you $200. That alone is a third of OP's total infrastructure costs.
If you want to discuss options in terms of cost, the very least you should do is look at pricing.
Yes, old hardware will be slower, but you will also need a significant amount more of it to even operate.
RAM is the expensive part. You need lots of it. You need even more of it for older hardware which has less efficient float implementations.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/floating-point-8-an-introd...
I'm really hoping for that too. As I've started to adopt Claude Code more and more into my workflow, I don't want to depend on a company for day-to-day coding tasks. I don't want to have to worry about rate limits or API spend, or having to put up $100-$200/mo for this. I don't want everything I do to be potentially monitored or mined by the AI company I use.
To me, this is very similar to why all of the smart-home stuff I've purchased all must have local control, and why I run my own smart-home software, and self-host the bits that let me access it from outside my home. I don't want any of this or that tied to some company that could disappear tomorrow, jack up their pricing, or sell my data to third parties. Or even use my data for their own purposes.
But yeah, I can't see myself trying to set any LLMs up for my own use right now, either on hardware I own, or in a VPS I manage myself. The cost is very high (I'm only paying Anthropic $20/mo right now, and I'm very happy with what I get for that price), and it's just too fiddly and requires too much knowledge to set up and maintain, knowledge that I'm not all that interested in acquiring right now. Some people enjoy doing that, but that's not me. And the current open models and tooling around them just don't seem to be in the same class as what you can get from Anthropic et al.
But yes, I hope and expect this will change!
At the moment there appears to be ~no demand for older models, even models that people praised just a few months ago. I suspect until AGI/ASI is reached or progress plateaus, that will continue be the case.
For other use-cases, like translations or basic queries, there's a "good enough".
And I expect that over time the gap will narrow. Sure, it's likely that commercially-built LLMs will be a step ahead of the open models, but -- just to make up numbers -- say today the commercially-built ones are 50% better. I could see that narrowing to 5% or something like that, after some number of years have passed. Maybe 5% is a reasonable trade-off for some people to make, depending on what they care about.
Also consider that OpenAI, Anthropic, et al. are all burning through VC money like nobody's business. That money isn't going to last forever. Maybe at some point Anthropic's Pro plan becomes $100/mo, and Max becomes $500-$1000/mo. Building and maintaining your own hardware, and settling for the not-quite-the-best models might be very much worth it.
But the foundation models will eventually hit a limit, and the open-source ecosystem, which trails by around a year or two, will catch up.
However, small models are continuing to improve at the same time that large RAM capacity computing hardware is becoming cheaper. These two will eventually intersect at a point where local performance is good enough and fast enough.
But the open db got good enough that you need to justify not using them with specific reasons why.
That seems at least as likely an outcome for models as they continue to improve infinitely into the stars.
That was in 2021. Today if you ask who my friend is, it tells you that he is an elephant, without even doing a web search.
I wouldn’t be surprised if people are doing this with more serious things.
Seems plausible the same goes for AI.
I remember Uber and AirBnB used to seem like unbelievably good deals, for example. That stopped eventually.
And Uber is still big but about 30% of the time in places I go to, in Europe, it's just another website/app to call local taxis from (medallion and all). And I'm fairly sure locals generally just use the website/app of the local company, directly, and Uber is just a frontend for foreigners unfamiliar with that.
And my phone uses a tiny, tiny amount of power, comparatively, to do so.
CPU extensions and other improvements will make AI a simple, tiny task. Many of the improvements will come from robotics.
We have long entered an era where computing is becoming more expensive and power hungry, we're just lucky regular computer usage has largely plateaued at a level where the already obtained performance is good enough.
But major leaps are a lot more costly these days.
What I think we’ll see is: people will realize some things that suck in the current first-generation of laptop NPUs. The next generation of that hardware will get better as a result. The software should generally get better and lighter. We’re currently at step -.5 here, because ~nobody has bought these laptops yet! This will happen in a couple years.
Meanwhile, eventually the cloud LLM hosts will run out of investors money to subsidize our use of their computers. They’ll have to actually start charging enough to make a profit. On top of what local LLM folks have to pay, the cloud folks will have to pay:
* Their investors
* Their security folks
* The disposal costs for all those obsolete NVIDIA cards
Plus the remote LLM companies will have the fundamental disadvantage that your helpful buddy that you use as a psychologist in a pinch is also reporting all your darkest fears to Microsoft or whoever. Or your dev tools might be recycling all the work you thought you were doing for your job, back into their training set. And might be turned off. It just seems wildly unappealing.
Its because people are thinking too linearly about this, equating model size with usability.
Without going into too much detail because this may be a viable business plan for me, but I have had very good success with Gemma QAT model that runs quite well on a 3090 wrapped up in a very custom agent format that goes beyond simple prompt->response use. It can do things that even the full size large language models fail to do.
Life is about balance. If you Boglehead everything and then die before retirement, did you really live?
Not really? The people who do local inference most (from what I've seen) are owners of Apple Silicon and Nvidia hardware. Apple Silicon has ~7 years of decent enough LLM support under it's belt, and Nvidia is only now starting to depreciate 11-year-old GPU hardware in drivers.
If you bought a decently powerful inference machine 3 or 5 years ago, it's probably still plugging away with great tok/s. Maybe even faster inference because of MoE architectures or improvements in the backend.
And that’s fine! But then people come into the conversation from Claude Code and think there’s a way to run a coding assistant on Mac, saying “sure it won’t be as good as Claude Sonnet, but if it’s even half as good that’ll be fine!”
And then they realize that the heavvvvily quantized models that you can run on a mac (that isn’t a $6000 beast) can’t invoke tools properly, and try to “bridge the gap” by hallucinating tool outputs, and it becomes clear that the models that are small enough to run locally aren’t “20-50% as good as Claude Sonnet”, they’re like toddlers by comparison.
People need to be more clear about what they mean when they say they’re running models locally. If you want to build an image-captioner, fine, go ahead, grab Gemma 7b or something. If you want an assistant you can talk to that will give you advice or help you with arbitrary tasks for work, that’s not something that’s on the menu.
I feel like you haven't actually used it. Your comment may have been true 5 years ago.
> If you want an assistant you can talk to that will give you advice or help you with arbitrary tasks for work, that’s not something that’s on the menu.
You can use a RAG approach (eg. Milvus) and also LoRA templates to dramatically improve the accuracy of the answer if needed.
Locally you can run multiple models, multiple times without having to worry about costs.
You also have the likes of Open WebUI which builds numerous features on top of an interface if you don't want to do coding.
I have a very old M1 MBP 32GB and I have numerous applications built to do custom work. It does the job the fine and speed is not an issue. Not good enough to do a LoRA build but I have a more recent laptop for that.
I doubt I am the only one.
For inference purposes, though, compute shaders have worked fine for all 3 manufacturers. It's really only Nvidia users that benefit from the wealth of finetuning/training programs that are typically CUDA-native.
I think this is the difference between people who embrace hobby LLMs and people who don’t:
The token/s output speed on affordable local hardware for large models is not great for me. I already wish the cloud hosted solutions were several times faster. Any time I go to a local model it feels like I’m writing e-mails back and forth to an LLM, not working with it.
And also, the first Apple M1 chip was released less than 5 years ago, not 7.
Do you have a good accelerator? If you're offloading to a powerful GPU it shouldn't feel like that at all. I've gotten ChatGPT speeds from a 4060 running the OSS 20B and Qwen3 30B models, both of which are competitive with OpenAI's last-gen models.
> the first Apple M1 chip was released less than 5 years ago
Core ML has been running on Apple-designed silicon for 8 years now, if we really want to get pedantic. But sure, actual LLM/transformer use is a more recent phenomenon.
Also, at the end of the day is about value creates and AI may allow some people to generate more stuff but overall value still tends to align with who is better at the craft pre AI. Not who pays more.
Unless you're a billionaire with pull, you're building tools you cant control, cant own and are ephermap wisps.
That's even if you can even trust these large models in consistency.
You're not OpenAI or Google. Just use pytorch, opencv, etc to build the small models you need.
You don't need Docker even! You can share over a simple code based HTTP router app and pre-shared certs with friends.
You're recreating the patterns required to manage a massive data center in 2-3 computers in your closet. That's insane.
I never paid for cloud infrastructure out of pocket, but still became the go-to person and achieved lead architecture roles for cloud systems, because learning the FOSS/local tooling "the hard way" put me in a better position to understand what exactly my corporate employers can leverage with the big cash they pay the CSPs.
The same is shaping up in this space. Learning the nuts and bolts of wiring systems together locally with whatever Gen AI workloads it can support, and tinkering with parts of the process, is the only thing that can actually keep me interested and able to excel on this front relative to my peers who just fork out their own money to the fat cats that own billions worth of compute.
I'll continue to support efforts to keep us on the track of engineers still understanding and able to 'own' their technology from the ground up, if only at local tinkering scale
I feel like they actually used docker for just the isolation part or as a sandbox (technically they didn't use docker but something similar to it for mac (apple containers) ) I don't think that it has anything to do with k8s or scalability or pre shared cert or http router :/
If Cloud LLMs have 10 IQ points > local LLM, within a month, you'll notice you'll be struggling behind the dude who just used Cloud LLM.
LocalLlama is for hobbies or your job depends on running locallama.
This is not one-time upfront setup cost vs payoff later tradeoff. It is a tradeoff you are making every query which compounds pretty quickly.
Edit : I expect nothing better than downvotes from this crowd. How HN has fallen on AI will be a case study for the ages
And you'd need a lot of regular RAM because otherwise you start swapping at which point I think response times end up in days.
This tech is in the Wild West days, for it to be usable by the average person on consumer hardware, I think we'll need to be in 2030+.
a) on what data that things was trained ?
b) any reproducible builds projects ? ;)
Incidentally, I decided to try to Ollama macOS app yesterday, and the first thing it tries to do upon launch is try to connect to some google domain. Not very private.
I configure them both to use local ollama, block their outbound connections via little snitch, and they just flat out don’t work without the ability to phone home or posthog.
Super disappointing that Cline tries to do so much outbound comms, even after turning off telemetry in the settings.
Not saying it can't be done, but the effort is humongous.
now, if you have 100,000 users with latest iPhone, say you use 10GB RAM in each, using A16 chip with 1.9 TFLOPS, each with 5G connection
this is 1 Peta-Byte RAM + 0.25 Peta-FLOPs GPU + 4 TB / second bandwidth
at zero cost (no-upfront, no-maintenance, users pay for, upgrade, and maintain their phones working, pay for internet, charging with electricity, cooling? - thanks!)
... it goes even wilder if you use macbooks
... and if you consider say mid-size town in China with population of 15 million, you go Exa-scale
and consider that for now iPhones are just sitting idle. for now.
First of all iPhones have more like 6-8GB of RAM, 1-2 of which are already taken up by the system and system apps. Add some resident apps and maybe 1-2GB are already taken. Then of course during peak times, which are predictable but not guaranteed, 5-10% is maybe available. So out of your 10GB estimated per device, you actually average maybe 3GB.
Similar story for the CPU and GPU.
Then, availability: dead battery, no cell reception, airplane mode, etc, etc.
And on top of that, in the context of battery charge and long term wear and tear, you're assuming people will just let you run Bitcoin mining nodes on them.
You need a really solid incentive for people to loan you end user computing power for legitimate reasons.
Or if you want numerous features on top of your local LLMS then Open WebUI would be my choice.
Blazing-fast, cross-platform, and supports nearly all recent OS models.
Coderunner-UI: https://github.com/instavm/coderunner-ui
Coderunner: https://github.com/instavm/coderunner
Supports MLX on Apple silicon. Electron app.
There is a CI to build downloadable binaries. Looking to make a v0.1 release.
Hacking officially stopped being non-political in EU.
https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/
Enjoy understanding this here: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/
Measures of Innovations rank at... Article 57! https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/ai-act-explorer/
I bet that soon, anyone involved with sophisticated AI systems will be system-checked and require a license.
God bless you all out there and have phun!
And AI - if true AI - can be "end of times" type tech, you think it won't be regulated? This is not hackers playing with breadboards in the 60s, it's Project Manhattan in the 40s.
I hate sending my code to openAI or my client's code.
I find local llms to be usable for short snippets but still too slow for a lot of things.
I just spent hours debugging code mistral ai gave me and had multiple errors, rtfm is still most of the times better than relying on an llm
Also, the term “remote code execution” in the beginning is misused. Ironically, remote code execution refers to execution of code locally - by a remote attacker. Claude Code does in fact have that, but I’m not sure if that’s what they’re referring to.
If you put a remote LLM in the chain than it is 100% going to inadvertently send user data up to them at some point.
e.g. if I attach a PDF to my context that contains private data, it WILL be sent to the LLM. I have no idea what "operating blind" means in this context. Connecting to a remote LLM means your outgoing requests are tied to a specific authenticated API key.