NVIDIA just dropped Nemotron-3-Nano:4b — a tiny 2.8GB model.... Guess whose hardware runs it the fastest? - RTX 4090: 226 tok/s - RTX 3090: 187 tok/s - Mac Studio M2 Ultra: 86 tok/s - Mac Mini M4: 25 tok/s Home court advantage is real. Also trying a new layout with live performance charts. Lmk what you think!show more

Laguna XS 2.1 performed on Qwen 3.6 35B's level... in Tetris building and ran 2x faster We tested two open models on a single RTX 3090 in the Poolside coding agent. The task was building a playable retro Tetris as one self-contained html file. Each model wrote and rewrote the game across 3 iterations Outputs: Laguna XS 2.1: 45K tokens, 158 tok/s Qwen 3.6 35B: 39K tokens, 81 tok/s The two Tetris builds are near identical. Poolside's Laguna has a couple of small visual bugs that Qwen 3.6 35B doesn't, but it built the same game twice as fast by its built-in DFlash speculative decodingshow more

Gemma 4 12B QAT (dense) achieves 1000+ tokens/sec prefill... on 8GB VRAM with 120k context Gemma 4 12B QAT (dense), TurboQuant (Without MTP), RTX 4060 8GB VRAM: Prefill: 1000+ tok/s (42% increase) Decode: 25+ tok/s (25% increase) Context: 120k (150% increase) prefill was 700 tok/sec and decode 20 tok/sec with only 48k context without turbo quant (older test with mtp link in the comments) llama.cpp TurboQuant flags: -m gemma-4-12B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -c 120000 --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v turbo3 -ngl 99 --port 8080 tested with a 27k prompt, 120k context loaded. -ngl 99 here isn't a typo, full 12B dense, every layer on GPU, on an 8GB card. that's the part worth sitting with. The model has vision, audio input, thinking/reasoning and fits your 8GB card. TurboQuant's KV cache savings are what free up the room to do that at 120k context. side by side with yesterday: 26B A4B MoE got 320+ tok/s prefill. this dense 12B is clearing 1000+ rig: RTX 4060 8GB · i7H · 16GB RAM same two flags as yesterday, different model size: --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v turbo3 thanks to TheTom/llama-cpp-turboquant, TurboQuant fork of llama.cpp by Tom Turney (Tom Turney) to make this work. unsloth's model quant huggingface and the llama.cpp fork github link in the comments Do you prefer a dense or a MoE for your 8GB card?show more

MARCUS CHEN STACKED 30 MAC MINIS INTO AN AI... SERVER FARM. ONE $599 MAC MINI REPLACES YOUR $200/MONTH CLAUDE CODE BILL WITH $3 IN ELECTRICITY two months ago a developer posted his claude code bill on reddit. $170 in 10 days. someone replied "i bought a mac mini m4. haven't paid anthropic since." apple stores ran out of mac minis the same week the m4 chip has 120 gb/s memory bandwidth and unified memory architecture. cpu and gpu share one pool so the model loads once and both read from it. a $599 mac mini runs ai faster than a $1,500 windows pc with a discrete gpu since january 2026 ollama supports the anthropic messages api format. claude code connects directly to your local mac mini with one environment variable. same interface, zero api costs, $0 per request a heavy developer pays $459 a month across claude code max, chatgpt pro, gemini, cursor and copilot. that's $5,508 a year. the mac mini pays off in 3 months and runs on $3 in electricity after that uber rolled out claude code to 5,000 engineers and burned through their $3.4 billion 2026 ai budget in 4 months. the people who own the hardware in 2026 are going to look very far ahead in 2028 bookmark this and read the article belowshow more

Liquid's LFM2.5-8B-A1B smashed OpenAI's gpt-oss-20b on tool calling We... ran both locally on a MacBook Pro M5 Max, 64GB, and gave each the same trip-planning request that only completes if the model fires all 7 tool calls - weather for 3 cities, two currency conversions, an email and a reminder Outputs: LFM2.5-8B-A1B: 4.8 GB RAM usage, 7/7 tool-calls, 266 tok/s, 6.9s OpenAI gpt-oss-20b: 11 GB RAM usage, 3/7 tool-calls, 146 tok/s, 15.0s The 8B used less than half the RAM and still fired all 7 calls, while the 20B silently dropped more than half of its own. It also ran ~2x faster, wrapping the full agentic request in 6.9s against 15s. That's what 38T training tokens buy: a 1B-active MoE that nails the agentic tool calls a model 2.5x its active size keeps droppingshow more

i just tested to put GLM-5.2 on my rig.... 753B parameter MoE. 2x RTX PRO 6000 Blackwells, Threadripper PRO 9995WX with 1TB DDR5. prefills at 64 tok/s. decode holds at 13-15. system RAM bandwidth is the bottleneck. running UD-Q4_K_XL 4-bit. 69.7% on Aider Polyglot, within two points of BF16. left the 5090 off. mismatched VRAM unbalances the split. this is what local AI looks like now. massive frontier models on a "desktop rig". how awesome is this? and this is the worst it'll ever be.show more

the 24gb vram tier is enough for most builder... work in 2026. gemma 4 31b dense on my rog scar 18 just autonomously built a production hero section in one prompt, one html file and 5 minutes end to end. hardware: rog scar 18, rtx 5090 laptop 24gb vram. model: google gemma 4 31b dense at q4_k_m quant, using 22.8 of 24gb. engine: llama.cpp built for blackwell (sm_120). harness: hermes agent with native tool parsing. speed: 15 tok/s sustained, 94 watts, 50c. flags i used: ./build/bin/llama-server -m ~/models/gemma4-31b/google_gemma-4-31B-it-Q4_K_M.gguf -ngl 99 -c 131072 -np 1 -fa on --cache-type-k q4_0 --cache-type-v q4_0 --jinja --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8080 if you own 24gb vram in 2026, you have enough for most ui work, most agentic coding, most autonomous builds. no subscription, no one logging your prompts. a dense open model on consumer hardware shipping real software on your desk. this was the warmup. full page next on same hardware, then the octopus invaders final multifile autonomous challenge.show more

I explored a further possibility with local models: Qwen3.6... 35B A3B + NVIDIA LocateAnything-3B as a local Computer Use agent (proof of concept). In the demo, I asked it to switch my Mac to light mode. It did. Then back to dark. Did that too — finding the right toggle in System Settings, clicking it, and verifying the change itself. It's fully screenshot-based, so no Accessibility API needed. If it's on screen, the agent can see it and act on it. This runs entirely on your own hardware — private, local, built from two small open models.show more

This is the most hilarious thing I saw and... did today Ran gemma-4-12B-coder-fable5-composer2.5-v1-GGUF locally with 8 GB VRAM at 20+ tok/sec Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 launched June 9. By June 12 it was banned. I can't access it. You can't either. But here's the twist: I'm running a model trained on its chain of thought at 20 tok/s on my RTX 4060 8GB. Locally. Offline. No cloud. No export control. Enter: Gemma4-12B-Coder GGUF (Q4_K_M) Base: Google's gemma-4-12B-it Fine-tuned on verifiable Python CoT data: - Primary: Composer 2.5 real reasoning traces (only passing solutions kept) - Auxiliary: Fable 5 used to redo the hard cases Composer missed. Every training example's reasoning led to code that actually ran. No hallucinated logic. Llama.cpp flags: -m gemma4-coding-Q4_K_M.gguf -cnv -ngl 44 -c 64000 -v (huggingface model link in comments) Flag breakdown: -ngl 44 → offload 44 layers to GPU (tune this for your VRAM) -c 64000 → 64K context window -cnv → conversation/chat mode -v → verbose output The irony writes itself. Anthropic spent weeks telling the world Fable 5 (mythos) is too powerful to release. Then released it. Then got banned from serving it, including their own researchers. Meanwhile: a Gemma 4 12B fine tune, trained on Fable 5's reasoning, runs fully offline on my mid range consumer GPU No API. No cloud. Just me and llama.cpp. This is why local AI matters. Check out the model's link in the comments. How's your experience been with this model?show more

Run Gemma 4 26b MTP on 8 GB VRAM... GPUs at 25+ tokens/second. Flags included! local llm space is moving at terminal velocity. only 3 days ago google released gemma 4 26b a4b qat quants. more efficient than before, ran on 8gb vram at 20 tok/sec. and now just a few hours ago, mainline llama.cpp merged a massive update and we just shattered our own record. decode throughput went 25-40% up on the same 8 GB VRAM setup! Before MTP: 20 tps -> After MTP: 28 tps! llama.cpp just officially merged PR #23398 ("add Gemma4 MTP"), bringing native Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) support to Gemma 4 models. By running speculative drafting on the same 8GB VRAM RTX 4060 setup, my decode throughput on a 64k context instantly leaped to a blistering 25–27 tokens/sec thats 25-30% increase with the same hardware. Here is the architectural catch you need to know: Unlike the Qwen 3.5 and 3.6 series, which bake the MTP heads directly into the base GGUF, the Gemma 4 MTP head is not built in. You must download a separate, specialized MTP drafter GGUF (the assistant model) to act as the speculator. (I've dropped the download link in the replies). copy and try the exact flags: -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-n-max 6 --spec-draft-p-min 0.7 --spec-draft-model gemma-4-26b-A4B-it-assistant-Q4_0.gguf -c 64000 -v n-max 4 and p-min 0.7 is also worth checking out. benchmark on your setup and workflow. if you have a single 8 gb vram nvidia rtx 4060, 3060, 3070, 2080, 2070, grab the MTP drafter GGUF link in the comments and try it yourself. Check it out even if you have asmaller or a larger gpu, such as a single rtx 3090, 4090, 3060, 2060. MTP works for all gemma 4 sizes such as gemma 4 12b, gemma 4 31b etc. but remember to grab the correct mtp draft assistant models respectively. what are you benchmarking todayshow more

THE TESLA MODEL S: THE CAR THAT MADE ELECTRIC... VEHICLES SERIOUS When the Model S launched in 2012, the entire world still saw EVs as slow, boring, short-range toys for tree-huggers. The Model S changed that narrative overnight. It wasn’t just an electric car — it was a statement. Here’s why the Model S was so important for EV adoption: • It proved EVs could be faster and better than gas cars 0–60 mph in under 4 seconds (later Plaid versions under 2 seconds) while being completely silent and smooth. It beat most supercars off the line and made “electric” synonymous with performance. • It delivered real long-range capability Over 300 miles of range when most EVs at the time struggled to reach 100 miles. Suddenly, road trips became possible and “range anxiety” started to feel outdated. • It introduced over-the-air updates The first production car that could get major performance upgrades, new features, and safety improvements wirelessly — like a smartphone on wheels. This changed how people think about car ownership forever. • It forced the entire auto industry to respond Legacy manufacturers who had been dragging their feet on EVs suddenly rushed to catch up. The Model S basically lit the fuse for the modern EV revolution. • It made luxury electric desirable Premium interior, massive touchscreen, ridiculous acceleration, and futuristic design turned EVs from “compromise” into “aspiration.” Without the Model S proving that electric cars could outperform and out-luxury gasoline vehicles, we wouldn’t have the Model 3/Y explosion, the Cybertruck, or the flood of competitors now racing to go electric. The Model S didn’t just sell cars. It changed the future of transportation. It took EVs from niche to mainstream and showed the world what was possible.show more

Claude Sonnet 4.6, when asked in Chinese: “你是什么模型？” (What... model are you?) Confidently replies: “我是 DeepSeek。” (I am DeepSeek) This is the same model whose company just accused DeepSeek of “industrial-scale distillation attacks”show more

this is the worst local ai will ever be.... it only gets better from here. if you are not expanding your mind with these small models you are missing what's happening right now 99 percent tool call success rate. when steered well with the right skills and a framework like hermes agent the node becomes a cognition layer. not a chatbot. not a toy. an extension of how you think. i was cranking this node at 35 to 50 tok/s all day on personal experiments and now after all the work is done qwen 3.5 9B is iterating on its own code. the game it created. fixing its own bugs autonomously. and the part you should probably not miss is that all of this is happening on a RTX 3060. not an H100. not an A100. the card most of you have sitting in a drawer right now. if you just open that drawer and put that intelligence to work every tensor core on that card should be running for you. your work. your experiments. your thinking. you all have it but because nobody told you what this hardware can actually do in 2026 you never tried. the day it unlocks is the day you test your workload, understand the tradeoffs, debug the loops, and then decide if you need to scale the hardware. there is no point buying 3 mac studios when things done well you can squeeze a similar level of intelligence from 9B compared to 70B. but only when you create the right environment for your model through the right harness. and let me tell you i have tried claude code as a local harness. i have tried opencode. i have tried various others. somehow i landed on hermes agent and never left. there is something magical going on at Nous Research. the tool call parsers, the skills system, the way it handles small models natively. nothing else comes close for local inference. own your cognition. your AI. your agent. your prompts. your experiments. why give them away for free. those are who you are and they don't belong on someone else's servers being monitored. just give it a shot with your existing hardware. you run into a problem the community will help you. and if you are migrating from openclaw to hermes i will personally help you make the switch.show more

you're paying $20/mo for something your $500 GPU can... already do. Gemma 4 26B A4B QAT MoE + Hermes Agent running on a single RTX 4060 (8GB VRAM). Built a vision capable, 100% free, 100% local, private AI assistant that lives in my Chrome browser. No API keys. No cloud. No subscriptions. 100% vibe coded. 0% handholding. It has full context of whatever's on my screen can answer questions, summarize pages, extract data, and see images. Same local model handles everything, no external calls, ever. keep reading for the model and hermes agent tips i learnt while building this locally. Here's the exact setup for anyone running local LLMs on 6-8 GB VRAM: llama.cpp server flags (on my NVIDIA RTX 4060 8gb VRAM): -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0 -c 150000 --port 8080 Throughput with quantization: Prefill: 200-250 tokens/sec Decode: 20-25 tokens/sec reduce context if oom on 6 gb vram card. Key learnings: - Quantize KV cache to q8 for faster prefill/decode. Prefill goes from 100-150 (unquantized) to 200-250 tok/s (q8). - But watch out, once actual context grows past ~50k tokens on high entropy workloads, q8 KV quantization can cause hallucinations. Low entropy workloads are mostly unaffected. If you see it happening, drop the quantization. This is common across all local models. - In Hermes Agent settings -> Memory & Context, bump compression threshold from default 0.5 to 0.7. Default triggers way too frequent context compression and eats time. Up next: add persistent memory, web search, tool calling, streaming output and whatever you suggest. Running a 26B MoE with vision + 150k context window on 8GB VRAM would've sounded impossible 6 months ago. Works the same on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti, 3070, 4060 Ti, 5060, 2080, or any 8GB card. VRAM is the only requirement. Local AI agents are closer than people think. You just need to know where the knobs are. Model's Unsloth quant hugging face link in the comments. Have you tried Hermes agent by Nous Research yet? What are you building with local LLMs? Drop it below, let's see what this community is shipping.show more

How well can Qwen3.5 models debug code? I built... BugFind-15 — 15 buggy snippets across Python, JS, Rust, and Go. Docker sandbox compiles and validates every fix. Two trap scenarios where the code is correct and the model must resist "fixing" it. Tested every Qwen3.5 size from 0.8B to 397B, plus Jackrong's popular distilled model (V2). The 0.8B scored 5%. The 2B scored 10%. At 4B, debugging ability jumps to 69%. The hardest scenario: BF-03, a Rust trap. The code compiles fine — format! borrows, it doesn't move. Not a single model figured this out. From 0.8B to 397B, every one of them "fixed" a bug that doesn't exist. Category C (subtle bugs — mutable defaults, integer overflow, slice aliasing) was 100% across every model 4B and above. Category D (red herring resistance) told the real story — can it resist fixing code that isn't broken? No model scored above 90%. Small models can't debug. Mid-size models fix obvious bugs but fall for traps. Large models fix the hard bugs but still invent problems that don't exist.show more

here's how the whole thing works. claude code doesn't... care what's behind the API. it just sends requests and expects responses. so i pointed it at my own machine instead of anthropic's servers. llama-server runs the model locally. LiteLLM sits in between and translates the API format. claude code thinks it's talking to claude. it's talking to qwen on localhost. the setup: 2x 3090s, 38 layers on GPU, 10 on CPU. 128K context window. generation is only 7 tok/s but the tradeoff is worth it. 128K means the agent can hold an entire project in memory without losing context midtask. claude code alone loads a 17.5K token system prompt on every request. tool definitions, safety rules, agent behavior. that's your baseline before you even say hello. pushed as far as i could tonight. what surprised me most wasn't the speed. it was the iteration quality. first prompt gave me a working particle sim. second prompt, the model read its own 564 lines, understood the architecture, and added trails, explosions, gravity wells, bloom effects. no handholding. 4bit quantized. 45GB on two consumer cards. running a full coding agent autonomously. detailed article coming. full benchmarks, hardware breakdowns, engine debugging, code quality. everything from setup to what broke and why.show more

my 8 GB VRAM gaming laptop is absolutely going... to hate me for this. but I still did it. ran a 31b dense model (Gemma 4 31b Q4) with only 8 GB VRAM last week I ran Gemma 4 26B A4B a mixture of experts model on my RTX 4060 and hit 25–28 tokens/sec using llama.cpp's new MTP support. smooth. snappy. but MoE has a secret: it only activates 4B parameters per token despite having 26B total. that's why it flies. so the real question started haunting me. what if I throw a full, no tricks, every parameter fires on every token, 31B DENSE model at the same machine? # Hardware: GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4060, 8 GB VRAM RAM: 16 GB CPU: Intel Core i7 H Laptop. Gaming. Modest. The model: gemma-4-31B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf (model's unsloth huggingface link in the comments) This is Google DeepMind's flagship dense model in the Gemma 4 family that can run on single consumer GPU. It packs a hybrid attention architecture, supports up to 256K context natively, and is QAT (Quantization Aware Training) optimized, meaning it retains far more quality than standard post training quants at the same bit depth. This is NOT the MoE. This is 31 BILLION dense parameters, every single one of them loaded. # the flags I used: -m gemma-4-31B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -cnv --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-model mtp-gemma-4-31B-it.gguf --spec-draft-n-max 8 --spec-draft-p-min 0.6 -c 6000 -v Multi Token Prediction (MTP) is still active here. Separate draft GGUF required, same as the 26B setup. # Results: → Decode: ~3 tokens/sec → Prefill: ~2 tokens/sec → Context: 6000 tokens → Hardware crying quietly in the corner: yes so is 3 tps actually usable? For real time back and forth chat? Not ideal. You're not having a fluid conversation at 3 tps. but slow ≠ useless. And this is where it gets genuinely interesting. think about how senior devs actually work in a real team. But when something is architectural, deeply complex, or needs serious reasoning? they walk down the hall and escalate to the senior. That's exactly the local AI agent architecture this unlocks: → Fast orchestrator model (Gemma 4 26B MoE at 25+ tps) handles routing, simple queries, tool calls, memory. The junior dev. → Gemma 4 31B dense is the senior, called only when the fast model genuinely hits a wall. Hard multi step reasoning. Complex code generation. Deep architectural decisions. The agentic loop stays fast. Only the hard hops touch the 31B. That's a legitimate production grade local AI architecture on a budget hardware. (requires 2 8gb gpus) other workflows where 3 tps is completely fine: - overnight batch jobs. summarize documents, extract structured data, review code. Fire it off. Sleep. wake up to results. - One shot deep reasoning - Silent code audit loops, you write and test, the 31B reviews diffs and flags issues in the background between your sprints - Any workflow where output quality > output speed A few weeks ago, nobody was running a 30B+ dense model on a single consumer GPU with 8 GB VRAM. At all. Now we're doing it on an Intel i7-H gaming laptop with a NVIDIA RTX 4060, thanks to llama.cpp + QAT quants + MTP speculative drafting. Google DeepMind said the Gemma 4 31B targets "consumer GPUs and workstations." They were not exaggerating. The hardware bar to run serious frontier class models locally keeps dropping. the tools are here. the models are here. you just have to be willing to abuse your laptop a little. what workflows would you actually run on a local 3 tps 31B dense model? genuinely curious. drop it below.show more

MiniMax M3 just dropped — their first natively multimodal... model. So I ran it through my form-filling test. (The model has to place each element at the right pixel position on a blank form image, not type into a field.) Verdict: it got everything on the paper. > Name, DOB, ID, gender, marital status, nationality, email, phone, address, postal code, all there. > Best character spacing I've seen yet: it actually calculates the gap between each character, clean across the DOB and number boxes > A few fields slightly misaligned, but every piece of data made it onto the form The reasoning chain is the interesting part: it does the easy fields first, then works into the tight one-char-per-box fields, reasoning through y-coordinates, baselines, and label clearance in obsessive detail. The cost: 40:33 and 126.7k output tokens. That's a long think — but it's MiniMax's first multimodal model, and it nailed the content.show more

Qwen3.6 35B A3B can't fill out a paper form... on its own. But give it NVIDIA's LocateAnything-3B — the #1 trending model on HuggingFace — as its eyes, and the two small models get it done together. (The test: place each element at the right pixel position on a blank form image, not type into a field.) Setup: > Qwen is the brain (main model), LocateAnything is the eyes (helper model acting as a tool). > I gave Qwen a new tool: ask "where's the email field?" and LocateAnything returns the exact x, y, width, height. > The blue boxes on the screen are its detections. Look how tight they are — it nails every field. Result: > Qwen3.6 35B A3B + LocateAnything-3B: form completed, all info correct. > Name, DOB, ID, gender, marital status, nationality, email, phone, address, postal code: all landed in the right field areas. > Character-box alignment still a touch loose, but every value is where it belongs. > 9m10s, 224.5k input, 24.3k output, 21 turns. Why it matters: > Qwen alone can't finish this test. Bolt on a 3B model that does exactly one thing > locate > and suddenly it can. > A combination of small models can do the work of a single large one.show more

A viral paper "Language Model Represents Space and Time"... recently claims that LLMs learn "world models". As much as I like Max Tegmark's works, I disagree with their definition of world model. World model is a core concept in AI agent and decision making. It is our mental simulation of how the world works given interventions (or lack thereof). A world model captures causality and intuitive physics, telling the agent what is likely and what is impossible. It can and should be used for counterfactual reasoning, i.e. "what ifs": what would happen if I knock over a cup of water? Where would I have been if I had not taken that bus? Yann LeCun Yann LeCun says it well in his position paper ( I quote: "Using such world models, animals can learn new skills with very few trials. They can predict the consequences of their actions, they can reason, plan, explore, and imagine new solutions to problems. Importantly, they can also avoid making dangerous mistakes when facing an unknown situation." The first use of the term World Model in deep policy learning is attributed to hardmaru & Jürgen Schmidhuber: In their seminal paper, an agent masters shooting skills in the popular game Doom (demo below) by learning in imagination, using an internal world model as a "physics simulator". To put in a simple Python math formula, world model learns a function F(s[0:t-1], a) -> s[t:], which takes as input the observed past and current action, and outputs plausible future states. Now the definition of World Model in Tegmark's paper seems to be about predicting GPS coordinates and time eras. I see this as just a classification task with no causal learning and simulation going on. You cannot make meaningful interventions against that model, nor can you optimize any decision making in a closed feedback loop. As for the "space & time neurons", I think they are most similar to the "sentiment neuron" that OpenAI published in 2017: Predicting GPS is conceptually no different from predicting sentiment in my opinion. I don't think their experimental results are wrong - just that their conclusion is on shaky grounds. I welcome any debate! Paper link:show more

MiniMax M3 might be the most underrated coding model... right now. I gave it nothing but a screenshot of a chaotic 90s GeoCities-style fan page, no HTML source, just the image + the asset files, and told it to rebuild the whole thing as a sleek Apple-style 2026 site. One shot. Through OpenCode. The result is genuinely stunning. It kept the soul (the "stevibe's HyperHome" identity, the visitor counter, the guestbook, the webmaster portrait) and translated every section into clean modern design, gradient hero, proper typography, dark theme, the works.show more