[freedomben]

I've tried a number of experiments, and agree completely. If it doesn't fit in RAM, it's so slow as to be impractical and almost useless. If you're running things overnight, then maybe, but expect to wait a very long time for any answers.

[zozbot234]

Current local-AI frameworks do a bad job of supporting the doesn't-fit-in-RAM case, though. Especially when running combined CPU+GPU inference. If you aren't very careful about how you run these experiments, the framework loads all weights from disk into RAM only for the OS to swap them all out (instead of mmap-ing the weights in from an existing file, or doing something morally equivalent as with the original MacBook Pro experiment) which is quite wasteful!

This approach also makes less sense for discrete GPUs where VRAM is quite fast but scarce, and the GPU's PCIe link is a key bottleneck. I suppose it starts to make sense again once you're running the expert layers with CPU+RAM.