Comment by simonw

I've had the same system (M2 64GB MacBook Pro) for three years.

2.5 years ago it could just about run LLaMA 1, and that model sucked.

Today it can run Mistral Small 3.1, Gemma 3 27B, Llama 3.3 70B - same exact hardware, but those models are competitive with the best available cloud-hosted model from two years ago (GPT-4).

The best hosted models (o3, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5 etc) are still way better than the best models I can run on my 3-year-old laptop, but the rate of improvements for those local models (on the same system) has been truly incredible.