[milch]

I played around with local LLMs on my M4 Max 64GB this weekend and this is exactly what I found. I put Opus 4.7 "head to head" on the same task as Qwen 3.6 and a few other local models. The 35B did not perform well IME - it needed a lot of handholding and even then the final result did not work until a few more tweaks, while Claude one shot the task. The 27B was much better and also one shot the task, but took about ~55min as opposed to about ~15min for Claude. The 27B is probably something that I could happily run for many use cases if I had some faster hardware... the main problem there seems to be that at larger context sizes, prompt decoding can take several minutes.

[gcr]

This matches my experience too. The little a3b model is quite capable for its size class, as is the 27B model, but it’s still an order of magnitude less effective than Claude on the “effectiveness / time” curve