There’s no way around needing a powerful-enough system to run the model. So you either choose a model that can fit on what you have —i.e. via a small model, or a quantised slightly larger model— or you access more powerful hardware, either by buying it or renting it. (IME you don’t need Docker. For an easy start just install LM Studio and have a play.)
I picked up a second-hand 64GB M1 Max MacBook Pro a while back for not too much money for such experimentation. It’s sufficiently fast at running any LLM models that it can fit in memory, but the gap between those models and Claude is considerable. However, this might be a path for you? It can also run all manner of diffusion models, but there the performance suffers (vs. an older discrete GPU) and you’re waiting sometimes many minutes for an edit or an image.
I wasn't able to have very satisfying success until I bit the bullet and threw a GPU at the problem. Found an actually reasonably priced A4000 Ada generation 20GB GPU on eBay and never looked back. I still can't run the insanely large models, but 20GB should hold me over for a while, and I didn't have to upgrade my 10 year old Ivy Bridge vintage homelab.
Are mac kernels optimized compared to CUDA kernels? I know that the unified GPU approach is inherently slower, but I thought a ton of optimizations were at the kernel level too (CUDA itself is a moat)
Depending on what you do. If you are doing token generations, compute-dense kernel optimization is less interesting (as, it is memory-bounded) than latency optimizations else where (data transfers, kernel invocations etc). And for these, Mac devices actually have a leg than CUDA kernels (as pretty much Metal shaders pipelines are optimized for latencies (a.k.a. games) while CUDA shaders are not (until cudagraph introduction, and of course there are other issues).
Mac kernels are almost always compute shaders written in Metal. That's the bare-minimum of acceleration, being done in a non-portable proprietary graphics API. It's optimized in the loosest sense of the word, but extremely far from "optimal" relative to CUDA (or hell, even Vulkan Compute).
Most people will not choose Metal if they're picking between the two moats. CUDA is far-and-away the better hardware architecture, not to mention better-supported by the community.