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.
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.
It is still slow, a lot slower than what you are used to with claude and co.
And as soon as you increase context size, your memory requirements jump.
Then when it runs for 30 minutes for something claude needs 5, your device will get hot.
And even a used 3090 is apparently now between 1-2k.
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.
I have a few of them even a smart router called "agents" which will use local models but if it thinks the request might require higher reasoning it's routing to a different model
A 4-bit MLX quant with 128k window should fit perfectly, in the 50-70 tok/s range.
I've seen benchmarks that show 4-5x faster of M5 Max vs. M4 Max.
For local models you're likely using M5 Max, prefill is low thousands of tokens per second, as opposed to, say high hundreds with M4 Max.
For larger dense models, some fraction of that, but similar multiple.
qwen3.5:122b-a10b is significantly faster at around 60-65.
That gives me hope that "full family" means it will include smaller models like 4B.
Any idea where this model sits according toquality benchmarks? Pre-bubble MSRP on this hardware was $1400, and it draws 200-ish watts, putting it down into consumer territory.
I’m wondering if it can replace claude for llm-friendly coding tasks.
4.6 ~= 4.8
4.7 much worse.
Fable and newer consistently tells me to pound sand, so I’m not sure what I’m paying $200/month for. 4.8 sometimes does too, but it’s at least usable most of the time.
So, I’d expect this to mostly replace Claude for my workflows. The main tradeoff for me should mostly be token throughput vs. no longer really trusting anthropic.
This one is basically aimed at macs, Strix halo and DGX Spark.
Token generation is slow (and prefill is) but you will likely find it solves actual problems faster than Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B.
It also said 51B of n-grams and new attention (IIRC it said "Qwen Sparse Attention").
edit: here's a random screenshot https://x.com/AiBattle_/status/2092210011858460819/photo/1