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.
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.