Comment by nunodonato
21 hours ago
my laptop is 4 years old. I only have 6Gb VRam. I run, mostly, 4b and 8b models. They are extremely useful in a variety of situations. Just because you can't replicate what you do in chatgpt doesn't mean they don't have their use cases. It seems to me you know very little about what these models can do. Not to speak of trained models for specific use cases, or even smaller models like functiongemma or TTS/ASR models. (btw, I've trained models using my 6Gb VRAM too)
I’ll chime in and say I run LM Studio on my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 with no issues.
I have 16GB ram. I use unsloth quantized models like qwen3 and gpt-oss. I have some MCP servers like Context7 and Fetch that make sure the models have up to date information. I use continue.dev in VSCode or OpenCode Agent with LM Studio and write C++ code against Vulkan.
It’s more than capable. Is it fast? Not necessarily. Does it get stuck? Sometimes. Does it keep getting better? With every model release on huggingface.
Total monthly cost: $0
A few examples of useful tasks would be appreciated. I do suffer from a sad lack of imagination.
I suggest taking a look at /r/localLLaMa and see all sorts of cool things people do with small models.