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- Hacker News
- I was already rolling around the idea of a 128GB M5 Max MBP. Now this!
A 4-bit MLX quant with 128k window should fit perfectly, in the 50-70 tok/s range.
by pwython - Really happy for those with 128GB+ RAM. Sitting here with my Apple M1 Max with 64GB though. Was looking forward to a Qwen3.8-35B-A3B like many others.by bellowsgulch
- Really looking forward to this, 27B is a struggle with a strix halo and Laguna 2.1 can do stupid things for tooling calls.by syntaxing
- > We are releasing these architectural improvements ahead of time so that the community can prepare for the upcoming full family of Qwen4 models.
That gives me hope that "full family" means it will include smaller models like 4B.
by big-chungus4 - by fcanesin
- It will be interesting to see the intersection of this with inference engines like FreeToken which improve distribution of work for MoE models across CPU/RAM and GPU/VRAM.
If all it takes for a competitive model to run locally at good speeds is a used 3090 and some DDR4, then we might be in for the year of local AI.
- I enjoy the Qwen models a lot, but building things on top of them with OpenRouter has been painful.
OpenRouter does a lot of great work and I really enjoy being able to use different models so easily. I like when a provider is phasing out an older model that still works for my needs and the price is much lower. It seems like such a good win-win.
However, the problem is that many Qwen models have almost no capacity or is so flaky you literally have to just litter your code with a blacklist/whitelist of providers. OpenRouter has some attempts to solve this, but they don't work. In fact, OpenRouter has a lot of really cool stuff that is documented, but if you read the code it's not yet implemented or isn't actually there yet, which is a shame.
I tried to get in contact with them at OpenRouter about this and I was interested in working with them in the past, but it's difficult to get in touch with the right people and they are growing very fast. I expect being acquired by Stripe will accelerate those problems in some ways. I have no doubt they will resolve all of these issues eventually and scaling that much that quickly is really hard, so kudos to them, but the road has been pretty lame and taken some wind out of my sails.
by ddtaylor - Finally, a reason to own a 128GB Strix Halo or GB10 device. Or a reason to consider the new Mac Studio.
I have a Strix Halo and dual 32GB GPUs in my desktop, and the latter is pretty much always better for running local models because it's quite a bit faster due to higher memory bandwidth. There simply haven't been any models that are better than Qwen 27B or Gemma 31B, which run comfortably in 64GB with big context.
And, MoE should make it run at a close to usable speed.
by SwellJoe