I've been using Qwen 3.6 27B with LMStudio, and I was pleasantly surprised with it, although it was a little slow. I found mtplx last night, and it really wasn't an exaggeration to say that it ran the model 2-3x faster which was super impressive.

I'm trying to move to local models as much as I can, and I'm finding that it's becoming more and more practical. Admittedly this is on a $6000 dollar laptop (M5 Max Macbook with the specs maxxed out), so the hardware is still a bit out of reach for most people (the AI industry isn't exactly helping here..), but I'm getting the impression that the future is going to be smaller models with more focused training running locally. The danger of giving all your data to these cloud providers just seems too big to me, and I think they're going to start charging insane amounts when they need to show a profit.

> Admittedly this is on a $6000 dollar laptop (M5 Max Macbook with the specs maxxed out)

Sadly that laptop is likely $8000 now, after the recent price increase.