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points by ekidd 1 day ago | 0 comments

You can't replicate Opus 5.5 at home.

You can maybe replicate Opus 4.5 to 4.7 if you have some moderately expensive hardware. And that is definitely good enough for many people.

The smallest model that can even pretend to be a decent coding model is Qwen3.8 27B, which you realistically need 32GB of VRAM to run without breaking or limiting it in some really noticeable way. This gets you something like a slightly less capable Opus 4.5 with a much better work ethic.

[–] mortalapeman 1 day ago

Strata and Qwen 3.8 flash next is an 180B model running at 70 tps on my 5070 ti and 64gb of DDR4 RAM at Q3 quants and so far I can't tell much difference between it and any other non local model for my workflows/coding needs. Not saying local is better all the time, but it's certainly a lot more capable with minimal hardware than you're giving it credit for. Qwen 4.0 is right around the corner too.

[–] enraged_camel 1 day ago

The problem is that "can't tell much difference" is not going to be an objective indicator; you will be very likely to overlook the flaws of the local model and overweigh the flaws of the non-local model. The only reliable way to compare the two is to have your own set of evals based on the types of tasks you regularly perform and then run those evals on Qwen and a frontier model.