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Comment by stackedinserter | Hacker News Reader

The main gotcha for local models is insane hardware requirements.

Even for $10K you get mediocre performance.

This situation has improved quite a bit recently, Qwen Flash Next will run on a $4000 PC and can reliably implement small features on its own (feels comparable to Opus 4.5). It's a bit slow but pretty effective.

Less. Probably 2-3K if you build right. Qwen 3.8 27B on constrained tasks is Opus 4.6-ish to me, it just doesn’t know enough, but when task is laid out just gets it done.

Comes down to how much of the ambiguity we expect out of the model.

What would you build? Flash Next on 128GB works ok, 3.8 27B might technicially work on less but it's just too slow at least on current APU style chips. I'm curious about the non-NVIDIA 32GB discrete GPU options but I haven't tried yet.

Flash next only needs 64GB for core model inference. If you really wanted it.

Need 64GB vram, 900+ GB/s speed, and a lot of system ram (128GB). Seems feasible. Hmm.

Maybe older GPUs work.

128GB on a Ryzen 395 is enough but not by a lot. Around 90GB for weights plus 10GB to 20GB for KV cache and checkpoints. I don't know about 64GB of VRAM for less than around $2500 by itself.

Tesla V100? Would have to be a 3-ish bit quant in 64GB ram

I think this is worth revisiting once we get some solid 3rd party numbers from the new mac studio ultras, which admittedly are a bit over $10k with a 2tb ssd + 256gb ram. I think I'd be seriously considering it if I had a $200/month subscription of some kind.

Not anymore. Qwen 3.8 27B is so great that 5k investment gives you excellent speed and quality.

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