There's a lot of hacking going on right now with small (qwen 3.x and gemma 4 based) and medium (deepseek flash and others) models alike.

Have an agentic enough setup and they'll do anything that the biggest closed models can. They'll also do more, making them the true frontier.

A sensible point of entry is a 2899$ Mac mini.

If you're not partaking that's only on you.

> A sensible point of entry is a 2899$ Mac mini.

> If you're not partaking that's only on you.

There's honestly nothing sensible about that for a lot of developer budgets across the globe. Don't assume most folks have $3k to burn.

Yes, but that's a lot of money if you don't already have the hardware, plus you'll still be paying for electricity costs. (No comment on relative capabilities.)

$3k being a point of entry for a pale imitation of the models being compared to is not very inspiring.

Surely this is a joke or sarcastic comment?

They absolutely can't do what, or more of what the biggest models can do. There's nothing frontier about small local Qwen or Gemma models.

2899$ gets you a machine that is just good enough to run some small models, slowly, with terrible context, requires a ton of tinkering and fine tuning, managing and constantly downloading a bunch of huge file blobs, etc.

Partaking those $2899 in most of the large cloud models would bring you much more productivity, much less boilerplate and time spent in setup, etc.

So.. just weird accusing people here of "not partaking" in AI when you're just essentially toying around if you're actually comparing local Qwen and Gemma's with frontier models.

Yes but then you'd have to give closed-ecosystem-ass Apple money, which is worse than giving it to Nvidia who at least support linux properly. And you still get prompt processing speeds of a leisurely sloth.