I want a Qwen 3.8 27B hosted locally but I don't quite have the RAM for it. And, I don't want to buy the RAM until I prove I can use it.

Yesterday I did have success with Gemma-4-12b with 128k context. It fits in my RAM and it's relatively fast on my hardware.

I had to give it prompts that are quite a bit different from the way I use foundation models, but I did get it to work quite well. I feel like I could learn it's differences and get good at using it for real work.