Posted by shintoist 13 hours ago
If you are spending $800/month on tokens you are likely to notice degradation for local models compared to near-frontier models. The models I can run locally are consistently worse than Claude Sonnet 4.6 (again for the work I give them), although Qwen3.6 does feel almost like magic for its size because it can do a lot. The really big open-weight models should be better, but they want 200+GB RAM, which will need a correspondingly expensive CPU.
I wouldn't bother with less than 32GB of VRAM. With 16GB you can already run something usable, but 32GB gives you much more power. 9B and 14B are only interesting if you want to tune models yourself. The sweet spot now seem to be around 27B-35B.
This sort of thing is key to knowing what's going on and bit having your brain fully atrophy.
For instance, if you are an independent inventor trying to write a patent while keeping your patent lawyer expenses to a minimum, you want to write as much of the first draft(s) of the patent as possible yourself. (You’ll save billable hours with your patent lawyer, and you’ll end up with a better patent because you’ll communicate your innovations more clearly to your lawyer.)
However, and this is the big thing, you absolutely do not want to be asking a SOTA LLM for help with the language in your patent application. This is because describing your invention to a web based LLM could be considered a public “disclosure” of your invention, which, (after a one year grace period goes by), could put your invention in the public domain, basically… and thereby prevent you (or anyone else) from being able to ever patent the invention. Plus, you know, a random unscrupulous employee at the SOTA company could be reviewing logs and notice your great idea, and file a patent on it before you do. Remember, the United States patent office went to “first inventor to file” in 2013.
Oh and don’t take legal advice from random people on the internet by the way.
Imagine you're a contractor. You have a client who knows nothing about software development that wants you to write some software for them. They give you some code they generated with an LLM to get you started. Would you use the code or start over?