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by 9dev 2 hours ago
> I paid around $4000 for 4090m laptop

That's how much many developers currently spend on tokens - every day. Whatever "Apple Tax" applies to a device that can run a capable model offline will amortise itself in a blink.

2 comments

>Whatever "Apple Tax" applies to a device that can run a capable model offline will amortise itself in a blink.

Current high-end Mac Studio with 32-core M3 Ultra chip and 96 GB of memory is $6800, 96GB is not enough to run GLM 5.2 without extreme quantization or stacking HW; but for the sake of discussion let's run quantized version on a single high end Mac Studio.

GLM 5.2 Max plan costs $ 112/m, so it would take ~60 months to recover the costs assuming the machine was bought just for AI. By then the current AI landscape would have changed drastically.

I use local AI on both Linux and Mac every single day, there's freedom, privacy and peace of mind in running the model locally. But I feel cost/value of local AI is overblown.

In what sustainable world outside of Bay Area jobs do devs spend 120k on tokens monthly?
Nobody said anything about sustainable, or outside of the Bay Area really