Right now I feel like a 4bit Qwen 3.6 27B with MTP is one of the best for agentic tool calling for some smart voice agents in an H200. I wonder if DS4 Flash being using 80b at 2 bit with 13b active and MTP could be even faster and smarter and allow more concurrent sequences?
This special 2bit quantization seems like a big deal.
It'll require some kind of:
- breakthrough in architecture or
- breakthrough in hardware or
- some breakthrough quantisization technique
The problem is that all the parameters need to be in memory, even the ones that aren't active (say for Mixture Of Expert Models) because switching parametrs in and out of ram is far too slow.
We show that EMO – a 1B-active, 14B-total-parameter (8-expert active, 128-expert total) MoE trained on 1 trillion tokens – supports selective expert use: for a given task or domain, we can use only a small subset of experts (just 12.5% of total experts) while retaining near full-model performance."
A crow exhibits some degree of intelligence in what is a very small brain compared to humans. There is overlap in the problem solving skills of the dumbest humans and the smartest crows.
So the question is: what is that? Yann LeCun seems to think it’s what we now call world models. World models predict behaviour as opposed to predicting structured data (like language.)
If your model can predict how some world works (how you define world largely depends on the size of your training data), then in theory it is able to reason about cause and effect.
If you can combine cause and effect reasoning with language, you might get something truly intelligent.
That’s where things seem to be going. Once we have a prototype of that system, there will be many questions about how much data you really need. We’ve seen how even shrinking LLMs with 1-bit quantization can lead to models that exhibit a fairly strong understanding of language.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect to see some very intelligent low (relatively) memory AI systems in the next couple years.
Wink wink, nudge nudge.
I have a feeling most cybersec researchers would only be interested in negative values of "reduce" :D
prefill: 30.91 t/s, generation: 29.58 t/s
prefill: 121.76 t/s, generation: 47.85 t/s
Main target seems to be Apple's Metal, so makes sense. Might be fun to see how fast one could make it go though :) The model seems really good too, even though it's in IQ2.
Can't say that it wouldn't be a better idea to spend that cash on tokens from the frontier hosted models though.
I'm an LLM nerd so running local models is worth it from a research perspective.
- More RAM: bigger models, more intelligence.
- More FLOPs: higher pre-fill (reading large files and long prompts before answering, the so-called "time to first token").
- More RAM bandwidth: higher token generation (speed of output).
So basically Macs (high RAM, okay bandwidth, lowish FLOPs) can run pretty intelligent models at an okay output speed but will take a long time to reply if you give them a lot of context (like code bases). Consumer GPUs have great speed and pre-fill time, but low RAM, so you need multiple if you want to run large intelligent models. Big boy GPUs like the RTX 6000 have everything (which is why they are so expensive).
There are some more nuances like the difference of Metal vs. CUDA, caching, parallelization etc., but the things above should hold true generally.
> Gentle reminder on how, in the recent DS4 fiesta, not just me but every other contributor found GPT 5.5 able to help immensely and Opus completely useless.
I've noticed the same for lower level squeezing-as-much-performance-as-possible code work.
I also don’t have time to do much personal coding outside of work, so I haven’t subscribed to a personal one yet. But I intend to go for Codex just to balance the Claude at work and also because of the hostile moves from Anthropic toward their consumer business.
The long context reasoning is something I haven't even seen in frontier models - I was running at 124k tokens earlier and it was still just buzzing along with no issues or fatigue.
I am amazed at how well it works, I'm using it right now for some pretty complex frontend work, and it is much much faster than, for example running a dense 27b or 31b model (like qwen or gemma) for me (The benefits of MoE) - but the long context capabilities have been what have been absolutely flooring me.
Super excited about this project and hope Antirez can keep himself from burning out - i've been following the repo pretty closely and there are a ton of PR's flooding in and it seems like he's had to do a lot of filtering out of slop code.
Sure, MoE models have more knowledge, but extreme quantization may negate the benefits. And generally for coding tasks, you don't need a model that has memorized all the irrelevant trivia like, I don't know, the list of all villages in country X. DS4 also seems to run much slower on Mac Studio Ultra, which appears to be more or less in the same price range as RTX 5090. RTX 5090 gives me 50-60 tok/sec and 260k context with Unsloth's 5-bit quantization (only some layers are 5-bit too) and an 8-bit KV cache; prefill is instant too. It works flawlessly in OpenCode.
If you already have a spare high-end Mac, I can see the benefit, but I'm not sure it's a good configuration overall. Unless Qwen3.6 is more benchmaxxed than DS4 :)
