Probably helps that models like deepseek are mixture of expert. Having all weights in VRAM means you don’t have to unlod/reload. Memory bandwidth usage should be limited to the 37B active parameters.
"Memory bandwidth usage should be limited to the 37B active parameters."
Can someone do a deep dive above quote. I understand having the entire model loaded into RAM helps with response times. However, I don't quite understand the memory bandwidth to active parameters.
Context window?
How much the model can actively be processed despite being fully loaded into memory based on memory bandwidth?
This is why Apple makes so much fucking money: people will craft the wildest narratives about how they’re going to use this thing. It’s part of the aesthetics of spending $10,000. For every person who wants a solution to the problem of running a 400b+ parameter neural network, there are 19 who actually want an exciting experience of buying something, which is what Apple really makes. It has more in common with a Birkin bag than a server.
When engineers tell me they want to run models on the cloud, I tell them they are free to play with it, but that isn’t a project going into the roadmap. OpenAI/Anthropic and others are much cheaper in terms of token/dollar thanks to economies of scale.
There is still value in running your models for privacy issues however, and that’s the reason why I pay attention to efforts in reducing the cost to run models locally or in your cloud provider.
Unless you have a specific configuration, depreciation isn't much better than an equivalently priced PC. In fact, my experience is that the long tail value of the PC is better if you picked something that was high-end.
Low end PCs (mostly laptops) don't keep value very well but then again you probably got them for cheap on a deal or something like that, so your depreciation might actually not be as bad as an equivalent Mac. The units you are talking about are entreprise stuff that are swapped every 3 years or so, for accounting reasons mostly, but it's not the type of stuff I would advise anyone to buy brand new (the strategy would actually be to pick up a second-hand unit).
High-end PCs, laptops or big desktops keep their value pretty well because they are niche by definition and very rare. Depending on your original choice you may actually have a better depreciation than an equivalently priced Mac because there are fewer of them on sale at any given time.
It all depends on your personal situation, strength of local market, ease of reselling through platforms that provides trust and many other variables.
What I meant is that it's not the early 2000's anymore, where you could offload a relatively new Mac (2-3 years) very easily; while not being hit by big depreciation because they were not very common.
In my medium sized town, there is a local second-hand electronic shop where they have all kinds of Mac at all kind of price points. High-end Razers sell for more money and are a rare sight. It's pretty much the same for iPhones, you see 3 years old models hit very hard with depreciation while some niche Android phones take a smaller hit.
Apple went through a weird strategy where at the same time they went for luxury pricing by overcharging for things that makes the experience much better (RAM/storage) but also tried to make it affordable to the mass (by largely compromising on things they shouldn't have).
Apple's behavior created a shady second-hand market with lots of moving part (things being shipped in and out of china) and this is all their doing.
And the electronic shop is probably going to fetch a higher price than an individual seller would, due to trust factor as you mentioned. So have you managed to sell old Windows PCs for decent prices in some local market?
Anything in between suffers.
I remember right after OpenAI announced GPT3 I had a conversation with someone where we tried to predict how long it would be before GPT3 could run on a home desktop. This mac studio that has enough VRAM to run the full 175B parameter GPT3 with 16bit precision, and I think that’s pretty cool.