alt Hacker NewsI'm far less interested in how good a big expensive model is on hardware 99% of people can't afford and would rather see what runs best on a chromebook or mobile phone with 8GB of RAM.
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The reason models running on low vram are not talked about enough is because they are just not worth it. Qwen3.8 27b changed that, but even 24gb vram is too low for it. Running better model faster at 12gb vram is where its now at, and thats why you see people talkin about it
Because that's not possible (to have a GPT 5.6 Sol level model). People won't believe this and will keep dreaming, but intelligence is not free and 8GiB (shared with OS and other processes) is too small to be useful. Whether it is possible for 48GiB or 64GiB (meaning useful for model would be ~16GiB to 24GiB) with external fast storage (SSD), OTOH, is a question mark.
The 1% can afford to run these models without quantization.
The card in question here had an initial MSRP of $1600. It's been bumped up by the market, probably because it turned out it's nice for things like this, but it's hardly in the 99% can't afford domain, especially if you're using it to replace a never-ending rent at which point it will pay for itself very rapidly, especially for heavy LLM users.
In any case, we've gone from requiring supercomputers, to requiring very high end computers, to requiring $1600 video cards. It's tracking the exact same path that image rendering systems took (which if you haven't been keeping up there, now run excellently on pretty much any plain old computer), and we'll probably be there within a couple of years if not much sooner.