Obtaining that 64GB RAM is a meaningful obstacle for many.
I'm still amazed that you can run LLMs of this quality on a machine that costs less than $3,000.
I used to assume that anything GPT-4 equivalent or higher would need $30,000+ of server-class hardware.
That said... gemma-4-12b-qat is 7.15GB on disk so should run reasonably well in 16GB, that takes it down to MacBook Air territory https://lmstudio.ai/models/google/gemma-4-12b-qat
Not just RAM, VRAM, right? Though they're one and the same on the Mac.
I'm still amazed that you can run LLMs of this quality on a machine that costs less than $3,000.
I used to assume that anything GPT-4 equivalent or higher would need $30,000+ of server-class hardware.
That said... gemma-4-12b-qat is 7.15GB on disk so should run reasonably well in 16GB, that takes it down to MacBook Air territory https://lmstudio.ai/models/google/gemma-4-12b-qat
Not just RAM, VRAM, right? Though they're one and the same on the Mac.