4 ms·

I play with local LLMs a lot. I've spent more on hardware than I should. I'm friends with a local group of people who have spent a lot more than I have. The wa

I play with local LLMs a lot. I've spent more on hardware than I should. I'm friends with a local group of people who have spent a lot more than I have. The warning I would have for everyone is to temper your expectations and read the fine print carefully. The big build in article starts off with a $40K budget and then includes 4 GPUs that are $12K each. For those doing the math, this build is going to cost more like 50-55K. Local setups also often rely on quantization and techniques like REAP to fit the models on their hardware. You will read a lot of claims that 4-bit quantization is lossless, but those claims come from KL divergence measurements on a small corpus. Use one of these 4-bit models on long context coding tasks and the quality will be noticeably less. Even for non-coding tasks like dataset analysis, I can measure a substantial quality difference between 4-bit models, 8-bit quants, and even some times the full 16-bit source. This article is also encouraging the use of a REAP model, which means someone has cut out some of the weights to make it smaller. The idea is to remove weights that are less useful for certain tasks, but again this is going to reduce the overall quality of the output. The trap is that people say "I'm running GLM-5.2 locally!" and it sounds amazing when you look at the GLM-5.2 benchmarks. However they're not actually running GLM-5.2, they're running a model derived from GLM-5.2 that discards most of the bits and drops some of the experts. It does not perform the same as what you see in the benchmarks. In my experience, the divergence between a quantized/REAP model and the parent model is unnoticeable when you try it on very small tasks or chat, but becomes painful when you start trying to use it on long-horizon tasks where little errors start compounding. Then you get into the slippery slope of thinking you're $50K deep into this project, but what you really need is just one or two more of those $12K GPUs to use the next level of quantization that might improve the quality a little more and make your investment worthwhile...

CamperBob2 4mo ago
All very true. Right now, running GLM 5.2 at its full BF16 quantization level needs 1.5 TB of VRAM. You can't run this locally at a usable speed for less than $250K or so, and frankly I'd be surprised if it could be done for less than $500K. The best NV4FP quant for 5.2 appears to be lukealonso's at https://huggingface.co/lukealonso/GLM-5.2-NVFP4 https://huggingface.co/lukealonso/GLM-5.2-NVFP4, and it is capable of good throughput (75-100 tps) without losing much reasoning performance. Allowing for overhead for the KV cache and other requirements, this quant will (barely) run in 8-way tensor-parallel mode on 8x RTX 6000 cards. Not too long ago it was possible to put an 8x machine together for less than $100K USD, but that's probably not true now, assuming you buy all-new components. It'll almost certainly be worth it, given the abusive behavior we've seen and will continue to see from the major closed-model providers. If I hadn't already put a similar rig together, I'd be kicking myself. But getting it running well is by no means as simple as buying a bunch of RTX6K cards and calling it a day, and people need to know what they're getting into. Local AI is in its Altair and IMSAI days. There's no turnkey Apple II or C64 on the market yet, much less an IBM PC. Hardware, yes -- you can buy a capable box off the shelf from various vendors -- but you have to be prepared to take up a whole new hobby when it comes to getting a complete system working well.
- Aurornis 4mo ago
  > It'll almost certainly be worth it, given the abusive behavior we've seen and will continue to see from the major closed-model providers. The proper financial comparison for GLM-5.2 would be one of the providers on OpenRouter or renting a server as needed. Compare apples to apples. You will almost certainly never break even compared to paying per token. Local LLMs at this scale are only worth it if you have extremely strict requirements that data not leave the premises.
  - jobeirne 4mo ago
    Or if you want to hedge against the various tail risks of third-party providers raising prices or denying you service or somehow abusing your data...
    - Aurornis 4mo ago
      > hedge against the various tail risks of third-party providers raising prices They could 10X the prices and you’d still be better off. It’s also unlikely that prices go up enough to warrant a $100K local investment to prevent paying a couple bucks per million tokens. > or denying you service I guess you’re not familiar with OpenRouter? There are many providers there. There are providers outside of OpenRouter. There will always be someone to take your business. > or somehow abusing your data... If data security is your concern then you’re better renting a server as needed still. If you cannot tolerate any data leaving, then local models are the only way. You pay a high premium for it!
      - gizajob 4mo ago
        People seem to miss that with local models you can have them burning their wee digital brains out 24/7, which is a different class of AI usage than that from online models even at a few dollars per million tokens.
        CamperBob2 4mo ago
ttoinou 4mo ago
Well you could make a REAP with better input prompts on longer context then. It’ll improve the REAP quality
FuckButtons 4mo ago
I’ve found ds4 on my mbp to be very useful, bought before ram prices became insane. It’s not writing entire applications on it’s own, it has resolved annoying networking issues on my tailnet that I had neither the time nor inclination to figure out on my own and I often find myself reaching for it for simple but annoyingly research intensive tasks that I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to. Is it opus? No, but is it useful? absolutely and I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’m getting value out of a subscription or the api cost of using it.
zozbot234 4mo ago
> The warning I would have for everyone is to temper your expectations and read the fine print carefully. The big build in article starts off with a $40K budget and then includes 4 GPUs that are $12K each. For those doing the math, this build is going to cost more like 50-55K. > Local setups also often rely on quantization and techniques like REAP to fit the models on their hardware. This seems to ignore the very real possibility of running SOTA models at full precision on ordinary local hardware using SSD offload. Yes this will be slow and usually have very low throughput (even batched decode can only achieve so much before power and thermal limits become important, and that still leaves you with slow prefill as a major bottleneck) but that's OK if you aren't expecting a real-time response to begin with and your volumes as a single user are low enough.
- Aurornis 4mo ago
  SSD streaming throughput is too slow to be usable. GLM-5.2 has 40B active parameters at a time. At Q4 that's 20GB. The best PCIe 5 SSDs can get 15GB/sec when everything goes well. Every expert load would take more than a second. If you had enough RAM and enough SSDs in parallel you might get a couple tokens per second on a good day. If you left this machine running 24 hours straight, you might be able to get 200,000 tokens generated. So it can be done, but only if you interact with your LLM like you're e-mailing someone back and forth and you're okay waiting until tomorrow for a response. You would spend $50K to buy a machine that consumes 2000W and takes all day to produce as many tokens as I could buy on OpenRouter for $0.60. You would spend $5-15 on electricity depending on where you live. If you have no other option but to process data locally and you must use a very large model and you aren't in a rush, this can do it. I would not recommend it unless you're desperate and operating inside of rigid constraints.
  - CuriouslyC 4mo ago
    You can improve that with speculative preload. I'm sure models could be designed and tuned around efficient SSD offloading to keep throughput pretty high.
    - 4mo ago
odo1242 4mo ago
This is similar to my experience with (8-bit quantized, non-MOE, 26b) Qwen locally on my computer. It’s really good for small tasks, but the first time I tried to do a major task with it it straight up forgot what agent harness it was in and started using the wrong format for tool calls lol (If you’re curious, it was running in Pi, but somehow convinced itself it was running in Claude instead and started trying to call Claude tools that didn’t exist)
- aka-rider 4mo ago
  Model+harness combination means a lot. That's why all major labs are making their own. All models have quircks harnesses know about "you are reading the same file 3rd time you are in the loop, step back" I tried all frontier Chinese models, and Qwen is the one running the best in ClaudeCode, my personal theory, it's because Qwen was distilled from Opus.
bloat 4mo ago
They do say the cards were purchased when they were cheaper. They debuted at less than nine grand apparently.
vient 4mo ago
Wonder if AMD MI350P release will affect setups like this. From what I've heard, the price will be pretty similar to RTX PRO 6000 while having 50% more VRAM which is additionally an HBM3E instead of GDDR7.
- bradfa 4mo ago
  I’m also watching Intel Celestial with 160GB of LPDDR. Noticed lower memory throughput than AMD or NVIDIA, but potentially significantly lower cost per card. Two of them would likely run deepseek-v4-flash sized models pretty decently.
Der_Einzige 4mo ago
Everything in this post is spot on and it is a rare example of a HN person not saying BS about LLMs! That said, modern LLM sampling algorithms like min_p, top_n sigma , etc heavily mitigate the performance penalty you get from doing long context tasks. Problems with long context come from accumulation of small sampling errors over time. My qwen 3.6 27b (the dense one) runs perfectly well on coding tasks at the edge of its context window because I run it using modern LLM sampling stack, namely top N sigma of one, using DRY to stop repetitions and XTC as a superior alternative to temperature for diversification. Yes there will be a paper soon on arxiv and hopefully NeurIPS proceedings talking about this phenomenon because it’s not well appreciated by the academic AI community yet.
- pulse7 4mo ago
  Can you please share you llama.cpp server parameters to turn on modern LLM sampling stack? Docs [1] say that the top_n_sigma is already in the default sampler list: "(default: penalties;dry;top_n_sigma;top_k;typ_p;top_p;min_p;xtc;temperature)" [1] https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/tools/server/README.md https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/tools/serv...
nijave 4mo ago
Yeah, I really wish articles and comments about "<model> running locally" also reran the same common benchmarks published to compare the results.
nullc 4mo ago
> The big build in article starts off with a $40K budget and then includes 4 GPUs that are $12K each. For those doing the math, this build is going to cost more like 50-55K. Just two months ago you could get RTX PRO 6000's for about $8500 on ebay, which is the MSRP.
- Aurornis 4mo ago
  > Just two months ago you could get RTX PRO 6000's for about $8500 on ebay, which is the MSRP. The MSRP was raised to $13,250. Warranty is very important for expensive cards like this. I don't recommend buying on eBay unless they come with a very big discount.
stingraycharles 4mo ago
I would very much recommend first using a cloud vendor and setting up an LLM running on there to get a taste of what it’s like before buying the full hardware.
Abishek_Muthian 4mo ago
Absolutely true. All this craze about running coding LLMs locally has been detrimental to local AI where purpose built SLMs could actually be beneficial. Little tools for NLP, TTS, image processing, audio engineering, signal processing, diffusion plugin for Krita etc. are all great for local setup. I wrote a small piece on it few days back[1]. [1] https://abishekmuthian.com/multiple-20-ai-plans-are-better-than-a-single-100-ai-plan/ https://abishekmuthian.com/multiple-20-ai-plans-are-better-t...
aka-rider 4mo ago
I run Qwen3.6 on RTX4090, and it does amazing job for the most parts. For coding task, one needs to break the session among multiple calls I made https://github.com/aka-rider/orqestra https://github.com/aka-rider/orqestra but it's possible to do the same in almost any modern harness directly. The main idea is: - separate session that burns context on reading code and calling tools (context7, etc) -> markdown report "here are relevant patrts of code, docs" "with evidence" to prevent hallucinations - separate session for planning (architect) - (critic <-> architect) 1-3 times because small model skip over details - worker <-> validator, again, the same reason Qwen3.6 can run for hours looking for a complex bugs in read-only mode, and usually it gets it. Proposed fix would probably be hacky, but so as Sonnet's Qwen3.6 can mechanically write code by Opus-made plan. You would have to prompt afterwards: "Review your own changes. Any bugs? Cross-validate against the original plan - any gaps? Any violations of CLAUDE.md" But again, I need to do this for Sonnet. But also I use local llms for reindexing knowledge base. Grooming tickets: I can leave a caveman note "single panel for errors rendering, move all error messages" and come back to 90% ready specs with the end goal and context.
- NBJack 4mo ago
  I'm afraid prompts and clever arrangements of data don't really negate the parent post warnings. It's great if it works for you and your projects. Unfortunately, I can almost guarantee your approach will break down once you get a project large enough or switch to a less popular language. My favorite example is Godot; most local models just can't get it through their thick AI skull that code alone won't be enough to generate working solutions. They must accept a more complex harness, or you must provide much more info that eats the precious available context on every run.
  - aka-rider 4mo ago
    There is no replacement for large models, indeed. And this is not the point I'm trying to make. There are numerous applications for self-hosted models. As a simplest example, when you ask "explain what this code does" advantage of large models is negligible. I tried Fable, "look at this repo, find all bugs" — yeah, neither Qwen nor Opus can do this. > I can almost guarantee your approach will break down once you get a project large enough or switch to a less popular language. I can guarantee you it is not, I used my Qwen on 10-15 years of PHP — I just know how and where it will break; what to ask for, what not. Orqestra was/is self-hosted, being developed by, well, orchestra of Qwen agents. Moreover, Opus and GPT-5.5 break similarly, yeah they will withstand much more pressure, but they will hallucinate and loop nevertheless. My Qwen experience translates seamlessly. I learned so much about agentic engineering, harnesses, tooling, building custom MCPs...
nullbio 4mo ago
The models will improve and the hardware will remain useful. It's likely a good investment regardless, if you have the money to spend. Plus your business won't be stolen by Anthropic.

CamperBob2 4mo ago

All very true. Right now, running GLM 5.2 at its full BF16 quantization level needs 1.5 TB of VRAM. You can't run this locally at a usable speed for less than $250K or so, and frankly I'd be surprised if it could be done for less than $500K. The best NV4FP quant for 5.2 appears to be lukealonso's at https://huggingface.co/lukealonso/GLM-5.2-NVFP4 https://huggingface.co/lukealonso/GLM-5.2-NVFP4, and it is capable of good throughput (75-100 tps) without losing much reasoning performance. Allowing for overhead for the KV cache and other requirements, this quant will (barely) run in 8-way tensor-parallel mode on 8x RTX 6000 cards. Not too long ago it was possible to put an 8x machine together for less than $100K USD, but that's probably not true now, assuming you buy all-new components. It'll almost certainly be worth it, given the abusive behavior we've seen and will continue to see from the major closed-model providers. If I hadn't already put a similar rig together, I'd be kicking myself. But getting it running well is by no means as simple as buying a bunch of RTX6K cards and calling it a day, and people need to know what they're getting into. Local AI is in its Altair and IMSAI days. There's no turnkey Apple II or C64 on the market yet, much less an IBM PC. Hardware, yes -- you can buy a capable box off the shelf from various vendors -- but you have to be prepared to take up a whole new hobby when it comes to getting a complete system working well.

Aurornis 4mo ago
> It'll almost certainly be worth it, given the abusive behavior we've seen and will continue to see from the major closed-model providers. The proper financial comparison for GLM-5.2 would be one of the providers on OpenRouter or renting a server as needed. Compare apples to apples. You will almost certainly never break even compared to paying per token. Local LLMs at this scale are only worth it if you have extremely strict requirements that data not leave the premises.
- jobeirne 4mo ago
  Or if you want to hedge against the various tail risks of third-party providers raising prices or denying you service or somehow abusing your data...
  - Aurornis 4mo ago
    > hedge against the various tail risks of third-party providers raising prices They could 10X the prices and you’d still be better off. It’s also unlikely that prices go up enough to warrant a $100K local investment to prevent paying a couple bucks per million tokens. > or denying you service I guess you’re not familiar with OpenRouter? There are many providers there. There are providers outside of OpenRouter. There will always be someone to take your business. > or somehow abusing your data... If data security is your concern then you’re better renting a server as needed still. If you cannot tolerate any data leaving, then local models are the only way. You pay a high premium for it!
    - gizajob 4mo ago
      People seem to miss that with local models you can have them burning their wee digital brains out 24/7, which is a different class of AI usage than that from online models even at a few dollars per million tokens.
      - CamperBob2 4mo ago

ttoinou 4mo ago

Well you could make a REAP with better input prompts on longer context then. It’ll improve the REAP quality

FuckButtons 4mo ago

I’ve found ds4 on my mbp to be very useful, bought before ram prices became insane. It’s not writing entire applications on it’s own, it has resolved annoying networking issues on my tailnet that I had neither the time nor inclination to figure out on my own and I often find myself reaching for it for simple but annoyingly research intensive tasks that I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to. Is it opus? No, but is it useful? absolutely and I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’m getting value out of a subscription or the api cost of using it.

zozbot234 4mo ago

> The warning I would have for everyone is to temper your expectations and read the fine print carefully. The big build in article starts off with a $40K budget and then includes 4 GPUs that are $12K each. For those doing the math, this build is going to cost more like 50-55K. > Local setups also often rely on quantization and techniques like REAP to fit the models on their hardware. This seems to ignore the very real possibility of running SOTA models at full precision on ordinary local hardware using SSD offload. Yes this will be slow and usually have very low throughput (even batched decode can only achieve so much before power and thermal limits become important, and that still leaves you with slow prefill as a major bottleneck) but that's OK if you aren't expecting a real-time response to begin with and your volumes as a single user are low enough.

Aurornis 4mo ago
SSD streaming throughput is too slow to be usable. GLM-5.2 has 40B active parameters at a time. At Q4 that's 20GB. The best PCIe 5 SSDs can get 15GB/sec when everything goes well. Every expert load would take more than a second. If you had enough RAM and enough SSDs in parallel you might get a couple tokens per second on a good day. If you left this machine running 24 hours straight, you might be able to get 200,000 tokens generated. So it can be done, but only if you interact with your LLM like you're e-mailing someone back and forth and you're okay waiting until tomorrow for a response. You would spend $50K to buy a machine that consumes 2000W and takes all day to produce as many tokens as I could buy on OpenRouter for $0.60. You would spend $5-15 on electricity depending on where you live. If you have no other option but to process data locally and you must use a very large model and you aren't in a rush, this can do it. I would not recommend it unless you're desperate and operating inside of rigid constraints.
- CuriouslyC 4mo ago
  You can improve that with speculative preload. I'm sure models could be designed and tuned around efficient SSD offloading to keep throughput pretty high.
  - 4mo ago

odo1242 4mo ago

This is similar to my experience with (8-bit quantized, non-MOE, 26b) Qwen locally on my computer. It’s really good for small tasks, but the first time I tried to do a major task with it it straight up forgot what agent harness it was in and started using the wrong format for tool calls lol (If you’re curious, it was running in Pi, but somehow convinced itself it was running in Claude instead and started trying to call Claude tools that didn’t exist)

aka-rider 4mo ago
Model+harness combination means a lot. That's why all major labs are making their own. All models have quircks harnesses know about "you are reading the same file 3rd time you are in the loop, step back" I tried all frontier Chinese models, and Qwen is the one running the best in ClaudeCode, my personal theory, it's because Qwen was distilled from Opus.

bloat 4mo ago

They do say the cards were purchased when they were cheaper. They debuted at less than nine grand apparently.

vient 4mo ago

Wonder if AMD MI350P release will affect setups like this. From what I've heard, the price will be pretty similar to RTX PRO 6000 while having 50% more VRAM which is additionally an HBM3E instead of GDDR7.

bradfa 4mo ago
I’m also watching Intel Celestial with 160GB of LPDDR. Noticed lower memory throughput than AMD or NVIDIA, but potentially significantly lower cost per card. Two of them would likely run deepseek-v4-flash sized models pretty decently.

Der_Einzige 4mo ago

Everything in this post is spot on and it is a rare example of a HN person not saying BS about LLMs! That said, modern LLM sampling algorithms like min_p, top_n sigma , etc heavily mitigate the performance penalty you get from doing long context tasks. Problems with long context come from accumulation of small sampling errors over time. My qwen 3.6 27b (the dense one) runs perfectly well on coding tasks at the edge of its context window because I run it using modern LLM sampling stack, namely top N sigma of one, using DRY to stop repetitions and XTC as a superior alternative to temperature for diversification. Yes there will be a paper soon on arxiv and hopefully NeurIPS proceedings talking about this phenomenon because it’s not well appreciated by the academic AI community yet.

pulse7 4mo ago
Can you please share you llama.cpp server parameters to turn on modern LLM sampling stack? Docs [1] say that the top_n_sigma is already in the default sampler list: "(default: penalties;dry;top_n_sigma;top_k;typ_p;top_p;min_p;xtc;temperature)" [1] https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/tools/server/README.md https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/tools/serv...

nijave 4mo ago

Yeah, I really wish articles and comments about "<model> running locally" also reran the same common benchmarks published to compare the results.

nullc 4mo ago

> The big build in article starts off with a $40K budget and then includes 4 GPUs that are $12K each. For those doing the math, this build is going to cost more like 50-55K. Just two months ago you could get RTX PRO 6000's for about $8500 on ebay, which is the MSRP.

Aurornis 4mo ago
> Just two months ago you could get RTX PRO 6000's for about $8500 on ebay, which is the MSRP. The MSRP was raised to $13,250. Warranty is very important for expensive cards like this. I don't recommend buying on eBay unless they come with a very big discount.

stingraycharles 4mo ago

I would very much recommend first using a cloud vendor and setting up an LLM running on there to get a taste of what it’s like before buying the full hardware.

Abishek_Muthian 4mo ago

Absolutely true. All this craze about running coding LLMs locally has been detrimental to local AI where purpose built SLMs could actually be beneficial. Little tools for NLP, TTS, image processing, audio engineering, signal processing, diffusion plugin for Krita etc. are all great for local setup. I wrote a small piece on it few days back[1]. [1] https://abishekmuthian.com/multiple-20-ai-plans-are-better-than-a-single-100-ai-plan/ https://abishekmuthian.com/multiple-20-ai-plans-are-better-t...

aka-rider 4mo ago

I run Qwen3.6 on RTX4090, and it does amazing job for the most parts. For coding task, one needs to break the session among multiple calls I made https://github.com/aka-rider/orqestra https://github.com/aka-rider/orqestra but it's possible to do the same in almost any modern harness directly. The main idea is: - separate session that burns context on reading code and calling tools (context7, etc) -> markdown report "here are relevant patrts of code, docs" "with evidence" to prevent hallucinations - separate session for planning (architect) - (critic <-> architect) 1-3 times because small model skip over details - worker <-> validator, again, the same reason Qwen3.6 can run for hours looking for a complex bugs in read-only mode, and usually it gets it. Proposed fix would probably be hacky, but so as Sonnet's Qwen3.6 can mechanically write code by Opus-made plan. You would have to prompt afterwards: "Review your own changes. Any bugs? Cross-validate against the original plan - any gaps? Any violations of CLAUDE.md" But again, I need to do this for Sonnet. But also I use local llms for reindexing knowledge base. Grooming tickets: I can leave a caveman note "single panel for errors rendering, move all error messages" and come back to 90% ready specs with the end goal and context.

NBJack 4mo ago
I'm afraid prompts and clever arrangements of data don't really negate the parent post warnings. It's great if it works for you and your projects. Unfortunately, I can almost guarantee your approach will break down once you get a project large enough or switch to a less popular language. My favorite example is Godot; most local models just can't get it through their thick AI skull that code alone won't be enough to generate working solutions. They must accept a more complex harness, or you must provide much more info that eats the precious available context on every run.
- aka-rider 4mo ago
  There is no replacement for large models, indeed. And this is not the point I'm trying to make. There are numerous applications for self-hosted models. As a simplest example, when you ask "explain what this code does" advantage of large models is negligible. I tried Fable, "look at this repo, find all bugs" — yeah, neither Qwen nor Opus can do this. > I can almost guarantee your approach will break down once you get a project large enough or switch to a less popular language. I can guarantee you it is not, I used my Qwen on 10-15 years of PHP — I just know how and where it will break; what to ask for, what not. Orqestra was/is self-hosted, being developed by, well, orchestra of Qwen agents. Moreover, Opus and GPT-5.5 break similarly, yeah they will withstand much more pressure, but they will hallucinate and loop nevertheless. My Qwen experience translates seamlessly. I learned so much about agentic engineering, harnesses, tooling, building custom MCPs...

nullbio 4mo ago

The models will improve and the hardware will remain useful. It's likely a good investment regardless, if you have the money to spend. Plus your business won't be stolen by Anthropic.