News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Apple M3 Ultra by johnmaguire on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @11:50AM (#43269095)
It is much slower than nVidia, but for a lot of personal-use LLM scenarios, it's very workable. And it doesn't need to be anywhere near as fast considering it's really the only viable (affordable) option for private, local inference, besides building a server like this, which is no faster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897205
Re:Apple M3 Ultra by bastardoperator on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @12:43PM (#43269747)
It's fast enough for me to cancel monthly AI services on a mac mini m4 max.
Re:Apple M3 Ultra by diggan on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @12:49PM (#43269848)
Could you maybe share a lightweight benchmark where you share the exact model (+ quantization if you're using that) + runtime + used settings and how much tokens/second you're getting? Or just like a log of the entire run with the stats, if you're using something like llama.cpp, LMDesktop or ollama?

Also, would be neat if you could say what AI services you were subscribed to, there is a huge difference between paid Claude subscription and the OpenAI Pro subscription for example, both in terms of cost and the quality of responses.

Re:Apple M3 Ultra by lostmsu on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @01:45PM (#43270553)
Hm, the AI services over 5 years cost half of m4 max minimal configuration which can barely run severely lobotomized LLaMA 70B. And they provide significantly better models.
Re:Apple M3 Ultra by Matl on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @02:40PM (#43271267)
Sure, with something like Kagi you even get many models to choose from for a relatively low price, but not everybody likes to send over their codebase and documents to OpenAI.
Re:Apple M3 Ultra by nomel on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @02:08PM (#43270824)
It's probably much worse than that, with the falling prices of compute.
Re:Apple M3 Ultra by staticman2 on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @01:03PM (#43270035)
Smaller, dumber models are faster than bigger, slower ones.

What model do you find fast enough and smart enough?

Re:Apple M3 Ultra by Matl on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @02:42PM (#43271297)
Not OP but I am finding the Qwen 2.5 32b distilled with DeepSeek R1 model to be a good speed/smartness ratio on the M4 Pro Mac Mini.
Re:Apple M3 Ultra by a1o on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @06:55PM (#43274442)
How much RAM?
Re:Apple M3 Ultra by Matl on Thursday March 06, 2025 @04:19PM (#43285169)
It takes between 22GB-37GB depending on the context size etc. from what I've observed.
Re:Apple M3 Ultra by a1o on Friday March 07, 2025 @08:33AM (#43290007)
Thanks!
Re:Apple M3 Ultra by bastardoperator on Thursday March 06, 2025 @11:44AM (#43282232)
I'm running the same exact models.
Re:Apple M3 Ultra by fetus8 on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @12:49PM (#43269854)
How much RAM are you running on?
Re:Apple M3 Ultra by jamesy0ung on Thursday March 06, 2025 @02:44AM (#43277526)
I presume you're using the Pro, not the Max.

Anyways, what ram config, and what model are you using?