alt Hacker NewsIs the output coherent though? I am yet to see a local model working on consumer grade hardware being actually useful.
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Google's models work quite well on my Android phone. I haven't found a use case beyond generating shitposts, but the model does its job pretty well. It's not exactly ChatGPT, but minor things like "alter the tone of this email to make it more professional" work like a charm.
You need a relatively beefy phone to run this stuff on large amounts of text, though, and you can't have every app run it because your battery wouldn't last more than an hour.
I think the real use case for apps is more like going to be something like tiny, purpose-trained models, like the 270M models Google wants people to train and use: https://developers.googleblog.com/on-device-function-calling... With these things, you can set up somewhat intelligent situational automation without having to work out logic trees and edge cases beforehand.
I run qwen3.5 122b on a Framework Desktop at 35/ts as a daily driver doing security and OS systems and software engineering.
Never paid an LLM provider and I have no reason to ever start.
Qwen3.5-9b and Qwen3.5-27b are pretty coherent on my 24G android phone
It can write (some) code that works. Just roughly guessing from my use, but I think of it as being a bit like ChatGPT circa-2024 in terms of capability & speed.
Disappointing if you compare it to anything else from 2026, but fairly impressive for something that can run locally at an OK speed.
It's highly coherent (see my other comment for an example of its text output) and yes, it's useful. I am starting to use Gemma 4:e4b as my daily driver for simple commands it definitely knows, things that are too simple to use ChatGPT for. It is also able to code through moderately difficult coding tasks. If you want to see it in action, I posted a video about it here[1] (the 10 GB one is at the 2 minute mark and the 20 GB one says hello at 5 minutes 45 seconds into the video.) You can see its speed and output on simple consumer grade hardware, in this case a Mac Mini M4 with 24 GB of RAM.
I can try it for you
I have a 128 GB Strix Halo tablet (same as the other commenter here with the Framework Desktop). I'm using the larger Gemma 4 26B-A4B model (only 28 GB @ Q8) and it's been working great and runs very fast.
It's a 100% replacement for free ChatGPT/Gemini.
Compared to the paid pro/thinking models... Gemma does have reasoning, and I have used the reasoning mode for some tax & legal/accounting advice recently as well as other misc problems. It's worked well for that, but I haven't tried any real difficult tasks. From what I've heard re. agentic coding, the open weight models are ~18-24 months behind Anthropic & Google's SOTA.
Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B should just fit into 128 GB with a Q4/5 and may be a bit smarter. There's apparently also a similar sized Gemma 4 model but they haven't released it yet, the 26B was the largest released.