alt Hacker NewsI can understand the joy of running things yourself, and can also see the privacy aspect. However, I pay ~3$ per 1M/tokens for that model on Openrouter, and it's not even quantized. A refurbished 3090 and a 5080 will set you back well over 2k, not to mention the electricity to run them...
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An R9700 is $1350 and can get 100 TPS running Qwen3.6-35B-A3B Q5 with 130k context window (with room to spare) with a bit of fine tuning llamacpp-vulkan, but llamacpp's repository instability and lack of real versioning frustrates me.
In terms of electricity, if you aren't using it, even with all the vram loaded, at most your wasting about 30 watts or so.
Prompt processing a large uncached context is annoying, which is why I forced a lower context window, but I don't know if it's any worse in performance than the cloud models I've used.
There's a niceness, to me, knowing I don't have to rent it anymore. If you rent it, the terms can change regularly.
When they declare open models a 'security risk', his setup will be running, yours will not and even that 3090 will be way outside of your reach.
I use local models to explore, hosted models to refine. I somewhat envy those who can sustain local models (q8 120b+) running as a hobby.... for me, the practical path is a better SearXNG setup and knowing my routes forward.
It’s a personal hobby project why should we care this is how someone chooses to spend their free time and money? Lots of hobbies are expensive and pointless if you think of commercially available offerings. That’s why it’s a hobby and not a small business
Yeah but they can also be used to play games and do other stuff.
Openrouter doesn't give you access to the models internals, i.e. complete control of logprobs, sampler stack, any PeFTs.
Openrouter fking sucks and I don't know why people here act like it's so great. Stop using it if you care about local AI and accept that the cost you'll pay for tokens is higher than you will when consumed via any cloud. That's the price for privacy, control, and better quality via inference time optimizations that otherwise aren't available.
> I pay ~3$ per 1M/tokens for that model on Openrouter
I think the thing is, there's an unspoken "for now" at the end of that sentence and people running this locally are hedging against that "for now". Some people prefer to feel that they own the means rather than rent the means, even if the one they own is worse than the one they can rent. Especially with today's Fable news and the harsh realisation that the "for now" is dependent on very many unpredictable factors, where the one you have locally costs you capital today and a relatively predictable run-rate (made more predictable with on-prem solar for example), but should otherwise work predictably forever.
I'm not saying that you're wrong to do what you're doing, just that many people have their own lines in the sand where renting vs buying makes sense, and it doesn't only boil down to a rational (or irrational) financial decision.