
stevibe
@stevibe • 27,752 subscribers
LLM. Local AI addict. Building @BenchLocalAI DGX Spark workbench https://t.co/WN4i7q2y5m Builds things nobody asked for. Benchmarks things for fun.
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The AI price war is ON. > DeepSeek just dropped V4 Flash 0731 (big capability jump, $0.28/M output) > OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% to $1.20/M (OpenRouter is currently offering 50% off, bringing it to $0.60/M) Same budget tier now, so I ran both through 3 canvas tests: 🧊 Rubik's cube: DeepSeek nails every rotation. Luna's turns are buggy, stickers fly off mid-move. 🎆 Fireworks: both fine, but Luna lags hard when the burst explodes. 🖊️ Pen writing "Hello": neither is legible. DeepSeek's cursive is looser, but Luna gave up on animating, it rendered a static image. GPT-5.6 is great at coding — but IMO only on Sol. In the same pricing tier, DeepSeek clearly beats Luna.
stevibe278,264 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

Opus 4.7 first-hour impressions Ran the canvas tree growth test twice. 4.6: nailed the animation both times 4.7: static tree, no growth animation — twice 4.7's thinking is noticeably shorter and faster though (trimmed some 4.6 thinking in the clip for pacing). Not the upgrade direction I expected on this one.
stevibe488,336 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад

This looks like a toy. It's actually the meanest little vision eval I've built. The task: look at an emoji image, then repaint it on a 16×16 grid, one pixel at a time. Just the model, a tiny canvas, and up to 2000 brushstrokes. What I didn't expect was the personalities. > some models REGRET a stroke and go back to repaint it > some get stuck looping the same little patch over and over, like they're trying to animate it > some are calm little surgeons and just nail it first try And the task is genuinely mean: it has to see the image, crush it down to 256 cells, then decide what's actually load-bearing: > the tears on 😂 but still keep the smile > the horn on 🦄 > the antenna on 🤖 and keep the soul of it with almost no resolution to spare. 5 models. 7 emojis. Best of 5 runs each. Side by side. Who's your winner?
stevibe284,432 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад

Qwen3.6 35B-A3B dropped yesterday, so I ran it on 4 GPUs to see how it performs: 🟣 RTX 3090 — 49.78 tok/s, TTFT 852ms 🟡 RTX 4090 — 118.93 tok/s, TTFT 686ms 🟢 RTX 5090 — 160.37 tok/s, TTFT 409ms 🔵 DGX Spark — 59.98 tok/s, TTFT 228ms I went with ollama as the backend because honestly, it's the easiest way for most people to get started. One command, model pulled, done. I used Q4_K_M (24GB) across all four cards. The reason is the 3090 and 4090 don't support NVFP4 (only the 5090 and DGX Spark could use it). Keeping the same quant everywhere felt like the fairest way to compare. And yes, you can absolutely squeeze more performance out of every card with vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM. But that's not what this test is about. This is just the out-of-the-box experience for folks who own a GPU and want to try the new model tonight.
stevibe403,356 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад

Qwen3.5:9b reasoning head-to-head: Mac Studio M2 Ultra 64GB: 43.08 tok/s Mac Mini M4 16GB: 13.07 tok/s Qwen
stevibe243,465 просмотров • 7 месяцев назад

I spent $4,699 on a DGX Spark and used it as a chatbot for six months. Not proud of it. But I think most Spark owners are doing the same thing, so let me tell you what changed. The moment was dumb. I had a recording of a client call, needed notes, and my first instinct was to open a browser tab and upload it to some transcription SaaS. Then I looked at the box on my desk. 128 GB of unified memory. Sitting there. Running a chat model I'd asked maybe 30 questions that day. And I thought: I have a supercomputer and I'm about to pay a stranger to listen to my client call. So I tried to do it locally. And here's where it got annoying: - my LLM can't hear audio - the ASR model I found is great but it's a CLI script - the transcript came out in two languages, need translation - summary needs the LLM again - now I want a mind map, that's another tool - oh and here's a scanned PDF from the same meeting, OCR, another tool Copy paste copy paste. Output saved to ~/Downloads/final_v2_REAL.txt. That's when it clicked: tokens per second was never the point of this box. A 24 GB gaming card forces you to pick ONE model, so everyone picks the biggest generalist and asks it to do everything. But 128 GB doesn't force that. You can keep six specialists loaded at once. A 1.7B speech model transcribes better than a 35B chat model ever will. A tiny translation model just translates and doesn't get creative. The big LLM does the thinking, and only the thinking. The hardware was never the problem. The missing piece was the thing that ties them together. So I built it. SparklingKit. (the name is a tribute to the Spark. also: a spark is one flash, sparkling is when it keeps going) What it actually is: → transcription, OCR, translation, image grounding, text-to-image, mind maps, chat. one panel. → six models hand-picked to fit together in 128 GB with room left over → queue-first: drop a 3-hour recording, go get coffee, check from your phone → nothing is a dead end: finish a transcript and "translate / map / chat with it" are already waiting → visual workflows: chain the steps once, run them forever → everything is a file. one folder. no database. copy it to back up. point Obsidian at it. → nothing leaves your machine unless you send it. The thing I care about most: if you stop using SparklingKit tomorrow, nothing happens to your data. It was already a folder of markdown and json. There's no lock-in to escape. Spark owners: you bought room, not a faster chatbot. This is how I'm using the room. No Spark? The panel runs anywhere Docker runs. Point it at your own endpoints. It's open source, and it's version one. Rough edges exist. Issues and PRs very welcome. Full details and a one-line install at If you've ever uploaded something private to a cloud AI and felt weird about it, this is for you.
stevibe56,229 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

MiniMax M2.7 is 230B params. Can you actually run it at home? I tested Unsloth's UD-IQ3_XXS (80GB) on 4 different rigs: 🟠 4x RTX 4090 (96GB): 71.52 tok/s, TTFT 1045ms 🟢 4x RTX 5090 (128GB): 120.54 tok/s, TTFT 725ms 🟡 1x RTX PRO 6000 (96GB): 118.74 tok/s, TTFT 765ms 🟣 DGX Spark (128GB) — 24.41 tok/s, TTFT 741ms Backend: llama.cpp. Context: 32k. Max tokens: 4096. I went with IQ3_XXS because it's the biggest quant that fits in 96GB VRAM while still leaving safe headroom for 32k context. Same quant across all four rigs, fairest comparison I could run. Now look at rough peak GPU power draw: 🟠 4x4090 → 1,800W peak (450W × 4) 🟢 4x5090 → 2,300W peak (575W × 4) 🟡 RTX PRO 6000 → 600W peak 🟣 DGX Spark → 240W peak (whole system) The RTX PRO 6000 is the quiet winner. One card, 96GB, matching a 4x5090 rig at roughly a quarter of the power and zero multi-GPU headaches. Best tokens-per-watt by a wide margin. DGX Spark is slow on generation but pulls the least power of any rig here, around 240W for the whole system. Prefill-friendly, memory-rich, wall-socket-friendly. And yes, plenty of people cap their cards. Even then, 4x 4090 or 4x 5090 still pulls well over 1,200W from the GPUs alone.
stevibe193,239 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад

Finally got my hands on the big one. Qwen3.5-122B-A10B — 122 billion parameters. Too big for any single consumer GPU. So I rented 4 of each... and then one professional card to see if brute force even matters. - 1x RTX PRO 6000 (96GB): 101.4 tok/s - 4x 5090 (128GB): 87.0 tok/s - 4x 4090 (96GB): 25.1 tok/s - 4x 3090 (96GB): 20.8 tok/s One single $8,500 card beat four RTX 5090s
stevibe197,300 просмотров • 7 месяцев назад

You know that "But, wait..." moment in every LLM thinking trace? I made it visible. I asked 8 models the same tricky probability question and rendered their reasoning as trees. Every time a model rejects its own idea and pivots, every "But...", every "Wait, actually...", a new branch grows. Same question. Completely different minds.
stevibe86,817 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад

Surprisingly, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 beats the Pro 0813 at canvas coding.
stevibe54,487 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

I gave Kimi K2.6 and K2.7 Code the exact same prompt to animate a letter burning to ash. Pure HTML canvas, zero libraries.
stevibe90,027 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад

So we know Gemma 4 is good at tool calling, but what about web coding? I threw 4 UI screenshots at three Gemma 4 models and said rebuild this, one shot, no hand-holding, just image in, code out. Model lineup: - E4B - 26B A4B (MoE) - 31B Dense (skipped the E2B this round) Let me know which one you think cooked the hardest
stevibe124,942 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад

Yesterday we found out Qwen3.5-27B (dense) beats both the 35B and 122B MoE variants at UI replication from screenshots. Today's question: what about Jackrong's Qwen3.5-27B-Claude-Opus-4.6-Reasoning-Distilled? A distilled 27B with Claude Opus 4.6 reasoning baked in. So I put all 3 in the ring: - Qwen3.5-27B - Qwen3.5-27B-Claude-Opus-Distilled - Claude Opus 4.6 Since the distilled model isn't multimodal, I gave all three the same detailed text prompts describing the UI components from yesterday's test.
stevibe126,288 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад