I have a M5 MAX with 128, local models are toys compared to hosted ones. I've spent a lot of time and money trying to make it work even 1/2 as well.

It all depends on what you want to do, I guess.

If you're seeking the kind of hands-off claude experience, obviously not. They are slow.

If you want to learn how these things work, train them locally, tinker, play with the code, grasp the fundamentals, or just out of sheer bloody-mindedness and principle refuse to tether the functioning of your application to a cloud API...

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