Comment by embedding-shape
2 days ago
> Supports tool calling in OpenAI-style format
So Harmony? Or something older? Since Z.ai also claim the thinking mode does tool calling and reasoning interwoven, would make sense it was straight up OpenAI's Harmony.
> in theory, I could get a "relatively" cheap Mac Studio and run this locally
In practice, it'll be incredible slow and you'll quickly regret spending that much money on it instead of just using paid APIs until proper hardware gets cheaper / models get smaller.
> In practice, it'll be incredible slow and you'll quickly regret spending that much money on it instead of just using paid APIs until proper hardware gets cheaper / models get smaller.
Yes, as someone who spent several thousand $ on a multi-GPU setup, the only reason to run local codegen inference right now is privacy or deep integration with the model itself.
It’s decidedly more cost efficient to use frontier model APIs. Frontier models trained to work with their tightly-coupled harnesses are worlds ahead of quantized models with generic harnesses.
Yeah, I think without a setup that costs 10k+ you can't even get remotely close in performance to something like claude code with opus 4.5.
10k wouldn't even get you 1/4 of the way there. You couldn't even run this or DeepSeek 3.2 etc for that.
Esp with RAM prices now spiking.
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No, it's not Harmony; Z.ai has their own format, which they modified slightly for this release (by removing the required newlines from their previous format). You can see their tool call parsing code here: https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang/blob/34013d9d5a591e3c0...
Man, really? Why, just why? If it's similar, why not just the same? It's like they're purposefully adding more work for the ecosystem to support their special model instead of just trying to add more value to the ecosystem.
The parser is a small part of running an LLM, and Zai's format is superior to Harmony: it avoids having the model escape JSON in most cases by using XML, so e.g. long code edits are more in-domain compared to pretraining data (where code is typically not nested in JSON and isn't JSON-escaped). FWIW almost everyone has their own format.
Also, Harmony is a mess. The common API specs adopted by the open-source community don't have developer roles, so including one is just bloat for the Responses API no one outside of OpenAI adopted. And why are there two types of hidden CoT reasoning? Harmony tool definition syntax invents a novel programming language that the model has never seen in training, so you need even more post-training to get it to work (Zai just uses JSON Schema). Etc etc. It's just bad.
Re: removing newlines from their old format, it's slightly annoying, but it does give a slight speed boost, since it removes one token per call and one token per argument. Not a huge difference, but not nothing, especially with parallel tool calls.
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In practice the 4bit MLX version runs at 20t/s for general chat. Do you consider that too slow for practical use?
What example tasks would you try?
Whenever reasoning/thinking is involved, 20t/s is way too slow for most non-async tasks, yeah.
Translation, classification, whatever. If the response is 300 tokens for the reasoning and 50 tokens for the final reply, you're sitting and waiting 17,5 seconds for processing one item. In practice, you're also forgetting about prefill, prompt processing, tokenization and such. Please do share all relevant numbers :)