This is great as a first look, but the author is not a developer, so we don't yet know whether a dev can be as productive with local models on M5 Mac Studio compared to a 20x subscription plan.
I'm also curious about any new low hanging optimization opportunities in the kernels for this new hardware.
It's already clear to me that M5 Mac Studio is more cost-effective than anything you can run on open router, assuming decent utilization.
The M5 Mac Studio will be the most cost effective way to run uncensored cyber capable open agents.
An exciting tipping point will be if programmers can get an Astra-Ultra like experience all week with this hardware. That would be a real sense where this hardware exceeds the value of even 20x cloud subscriptions.
> This is great as a first look, but the author is not a developer, so we don't yet know whether a dev can be as productive with local models on M5 Mac Studio compared to a 20x subscription plan.
Local models are definitely not as productive as SOTA, sadly it's not close yet. I do think someday they will be "good enough" to use, but they aren't today. Even the SOTA models barely code well, with Opus 4.5 being the first, good coding model.
That being said, I think it's absolutely imperative that we keep pushing local model performance. We need to continue to advance technology there and ensure that the model labs don't do regulatory capture in the name of "safety" (or anything else).
With the latest codex (weekly quota burn) fiasco I tried open weight alternatives for the first time. And tyeah... open weight models cant compete with likes of astra yet. But, my hope is that by the time I get my Mac studio at end of november an open weight models would have closed the gap (which i think is realistic at the speed of progress). Now its true a better gpt version will also be available then but it also seems the gap is shrinking with time so theres that.
> And tyeah... open weight models cant compete with likes of astra yet
I think this is true, but also misses that a lot of us are just doing basic flask apps with a react front end. We don't need astra; Something sonnet 4.6 level locally is perfectly sufficient 95% of the time, and maybe 99% of the time.
This. People have convinced themselves that the absolute frontier is what is needed, anything below it is an unacceptable compromise, and we seem to be speaking different languages when it comes to discussing model capability.
It's like watching a discussion about cars available to take on a 100km road trip. A new car gets released that is on par with a Toyota Corolla but it is dismissed as completely useless for a 100km trip because it doesn't have the seat massagers and air ride suspension that the new Escalades have.
The reality is that something like Sonnet 4.6 is still amazingly capable for so many programming tasks, especially if you already have some reasonable level of experience to steer it in the right direction.
And if you think Sonnet 4.6 is still worthwhile, then it seems undeniable that something like Qwen 3.8-27B is also worthwhile.
srcreigh · · focus · HN ↗
I'm also curious about any new low hanging optimization opportunities in the kernels for this new hardware.
It's already clear to me that M5 Mac Studio is more cost-effective than anything you can run on open router, assuming decent utilization.
The M5 Mac Studio will be the most cost effective way to run uncensored cyber capable open agents.
An exciting tipping point will be if programmers can get an Astra-Ultra like experience all week with this hardware. That would be a real sense where this hardware exceeds the value of even 20x cloud subscriptions.
slowin · · focus · HN ↗
Local models are definitely not as productive as SOTA, sadly it's not close yet. I do think someday they will be "good enough" to use, but they aren't today. Even the SOTA models barely code well, with Opus 4.5 being the first, good coding model.
That being said, I think it's absolutely imperative that we keep pushing local model performance. We need to continue to advance technology there and ensure that the model labs don't do regulatory capture in the name of "safety" (or anything else).
nowittyusername · · focus · HN ↗
Octoth0rpe · · focus · HN ↗
I think this is true, but also misses that a lot of us are just doing basic flask apps with a react front end. We don't need astra; Something sonnet 4.6 level locally is perfectly sufficient 95% of the time, and maybe 99% of the time.
brandon272 · · focus · HN ↗
It's like watching a discussion about cars available to take on a 100km road trip. A new car gets released that is on par with a Toyota Corolla but it is dismissed as completely useless for a 100km trip because it doesn't have the seat massagers and air ride suspension that the new Escalades have.
The reality is that something like Sonnet 4.6 is still amazingly capable for so many programming tasks, especially if you already have some reasonable level of experience to steer it in the right direction.
And if you think Sonnet 4.6 is still worthwhile, then it seems undeniable that something like Qwen 3.8-27B is also worthwhile.
dash2 · · focus · HN ↗