Ask HN: Is it feasible to run a model on device for complete privacy?
3•mazinz•1h ago
Tried Gemma, Qwen and a few others. Need vision and larger context windows for an application I am working on. Results were quite poor Gemma 4E2B probably the best of the ones I tired but still fell apart and keep hallucinating with ~5000 tokens. Cloud based models had no problems even even Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite and GPT-5.4 mini do a lot better and a way faster.
Comments
benoau•1h ago
It's technically feasible, really just a question of whether this is worth $10,000(s) to you and you're willing to spend it.
mazinz•1h ago
Why financially crippling? It’s free to run on device. The native Apple Intelligence works well for smaller context windows and text only.
benoau•38m ago
You can get poor results "for free" from your laptop, but the devices you need for the large models are very expensive.
mc7alazoun•1h ago
Feasible but too expensive! I get that privacy is a priority for you but unfortunately if you want quality models you'd still have to maybe use frontier closed models..
mazinz•1h ago
No open source model that’s any good?
vitalyan1234•55m ago
the Gemma you tried is tiny, there are 31B and 26B (A4B) variants. there's also Qwen 3.6 with 27B and 35B (A3B) variants, reportedly pretty good. try them on open router or something. these require 30-40 Gb of memory to run between RAM and VRAM, less if quantized beyond near-lossless 8 bit.
there are near-SOTA open models, but they are 1T+ parameters, i.e. they require over a terabyte of memory to run.
benoau•1h ago
mazinz•1h ago
benoau•38m ago