I think gemma-3-27b-it-qat-4bit is my new favorite local model - or at least it's right up there with Mistral Small 3.1 24B.
I've been trying it on an M2 64GB via both Ollama and MLX. It's very, very good, and it only uses ~22Gb (via Ollama) or ~15GB (MLX) leaving plenty of memory for running other apps.
Last night I had it write me a complete plugin for my LLM tool like this:
llm install llm-mlx
llm mlx download-model mlx-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-4bit
llm -m mlx-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-4bit \
-f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/llm-hacker-news/refs/heads/main/llm_hacker_news.py \
-f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/tools/refs/heads/main/github-issue-to-markdown.html \
-s 'Write a new fragments plugin in Python that registers
issue:org/repo/123 which fetches that issue
number from the specified github repo and uses the same
markdown logic as the HTML page to turn that into a
fragment'
More and more I start to realize that cost saving is a small problem for local LLMs. If it is too slow, it becomes unusable, so much that you might as well use public LLM endpoints. Unless you really care about getting things done locally without sending information to another server.
With OpenAI API/ChatGPT, I get response much faster than I can read, and for simple question, it means I just need a glimpse of the response, copy & paste and get things done. Whereas on local LLM, I watch it painstakingly prints preambles that I don't care about, and get what I actually need after 20 seconds (on a fast GPU).
And I am not yet talking about context window etc.
I have been researching about how people integrate local LLMs in their workflows. My finding is that most people play with it for a short time and that's about it, and most people are much better off spending money on OpenAI credits (which can last a very long time with typical usage) than getting a beefed up Mac Studio or building a machine with 4090.
My tooling doesn't measure TPS yet. It feels snappy to me on MLX.
I agree that hosted models are usually a better option for most people - much faster, higher quality, handle longer inputs, really cheap.
I enjoy local models for research and for the occasional offline scenario.
I'm also interested in their applications for journalism, specifically for dealing with extremely sensitive data like leaked information from confidential sources.
>I'm also interested in their applications for journalism, specifically for dealing with extremely sensitive data like leaked information from confidential sources.
Think it is NOT just you. Most company with decent management also would not want their data going to anything outside the physical server they have in control of. But yeah for most people just use an app and hosted server. But this is HN,there are ppl here hosting their own email servers, so shouldn't be too hard to run llm locally.
Yeah, this has been confusing me a bit. I'm not complaining by ANY means, but why does it suddenly feel like everyone cares about data privacy in LLM contexts, way more than previous attitudes to allowing data to sit on a bunch of random SaaS products?
I assume because of the assumption that the AI companies will train off of your data, causing it to leak? But I thought all these services had enterprise tiers where they'll promise not to do that?
Again, I'm not complaining, it's good to see people caring about where their data goes. Just interesting that they care now, but not before. (In some ways LLMs should be one of the safer services, since they don't even really need to store any data, they can delete it after the query or conversation is over.)
Laundering of data through training makes it a more complicated case than a simple data theft or copyright infringement.
Leaks could be accidental, e.g. due to an employee logging in to their free-as-in-labor personal account instead of a no-training Enterprise account.
It's safer to have a complete ban on providers that may collect data for training.
Their entire business model based on taking other peoples stuff. I cant imagine someone would willingly drown with the sinking ship if the entire cargo is filled with lifeboats - just because they promised they would.
Being caught doing they would be wildly harmful to their business - billions of dollars harmful, especially given the contracts they sign with their customers. The brand damage would be unimaginably expensive too.
There is no world in which training on customer data without permission would be worth it for AWS.
? One single random document, maybe, but as an aggregate, I understood some parties were trying to scrape indiscriminately - the "big data" way. And if some of that input is sensitive, and is stored somewhere in the NN, it may come out in an output - in theory...
Actually I never researched the details of the potential phenomenon - that anything personal may be stored (not just George III but Random Randy) -, but it seems possible.
There's a pretty common misconception that training LLMs is about loading in as much data as possible no matter the source.
That might have been true a few years ago but today the top AI labs are all focusing on quality: they're trying to find the best possible sources of high quality tokens, not randomly dumping in anything they can obtain.
> Turns out that LLMs learn a lot better and faster from educational content as well. This is partly because the average Common Crawl article (internet pages) is not of very high value and distracts the training, packing in too much irrelevant information. The average webpage on the internet is so random and terrible it's not even clear how prior LLMs learn anything at all.
Obviously the training data should be preferably high quality - but there you have a (pseudo-, I insisted also elsewhere citing the rights to have read whatever is in any public library) problem with "copyright".
If there exists some advantage on quantity though, then achieving high quality imposes questions about tradeoffs and workflows - sources where authors are "free participants" could have odd data sip in.
And the matter of whether such data may be reflected in outputs remains as a question (probably tackled by some I have not read... Ars longa, vita brevis).
In Scandinavian financial related severs must in the country! That always sounded like a sane approach. The whole putting your data on saas or AWS just seems like the same "Let's shift the responsibility to a big player".
Any important data should NOT be in devices that is NOT physically with in our jurisdiction.
Or GitHub. I’m always amused when people don’t want to send fractions of their code to a LLM but happily host it on GitHub. All big llm providers offer no-training-on-your-data business plans.
Unlikely they think Microsoft or GitHub wants to steal it.
With LLMs, they're thinking of examples that regurgitated proprietary code, and contrary to everyday general observation, valuable proprietary code does exist.
But with GitHub, the thinking is generally the opposite: the worry is that the code is terrible, and seeing it would be like giant blinkenlights* indicating the way in.
That's why AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI and Azure AI model inference exist - they're all hosted LLM services that offer the same compliance guarantees that you get from regular AWS-style hosting agreements.
AWS has a strong track record, a clear business model that isn’t predicated on gathering as much data as possible, and an awful lot to lose if they break their promises.
Lots of AI companies have some of these, but not to the same extent.
> "Most company with decent management also would not want their data going to anything outside the physical server they have in control of."
Most companies physical and digital security controls are so much worst than anything from AWS or Google. Note I dont include Azure...but a physical server they have control of is a phrase that screams vulnerability.
If they get hit by a government subpoena because a journalist has been using them to analyze leaked corporate or government secret files I also trust them to honor that subpoena.
Sometimes journalists deal with material that they cannot risk leaving their own machine.
"News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress"
> Whereas on local LLM, I watch it painstakingly prints preambles that I don't care about, and get what I actually need after 20 seconds.
You may need to "right-size" the models you use to match your hardware, model, and TPS expectations, which may involve using a smaller version of the model with faster TPS, upgrading your jardware, or paying for hosted models.
Alternatively, if you can use agentic workflows or tools like Aider, you don't have to watch the model work slowly with large modles locally. Instead you queue work for it, go to sleep, or eat, or do other work, and then much later look over the Pull Requests whenever it completes them.
I have a 4070 super for gaming, and used it to play with LLM a few times. It is by no means a bad card, but I realize that unless I want to get 4090 or new Macs that I don't have any other use for, I can only use it to run smaller models. However, most smaller models aren't satisfactory and are still slower than hosted LLMs. I haven't found a model that I am happy with for my hardware.
Regarding agentic workflows -- sounds nice but I am too scared to try it out, based on my experience with standard LLMs like GPT or Claude for writing code. Small snippets or filling in missing unit tests, fine, anything more complicated? Has been a disaster for me.
As I understand it, these models are limited on GPU memory far more than GPU compute. You’d be better off with dual 4070s than with a single 4090 unless the 4090 has more RAM than the other two combined.
I have never found any agent able to put together sensible pull requests without constant hand holding. I shudder to think of what those repositories must look like.
Sometimes TPS doesn't matter. I've generated textual descriptions for 100K or so images in my photo archive, some of which I have absolutely no interest in uploading to someone else's computer. This works pretty well with Gemma. I use local LLMs all the time for things where privacy is even remotely important. I estimate this constitutes easily a quarter of my LLM usage.
This is a really cool idea. Do you pretrain the model so it can tag people? I have so many photo's that it seems impossible to ever categorize them,using a workflow like yours might help a lot
No, tagging of people is already handled by another model. Gemma just describes what's in the image, and produces a comma separated list of keywords. No additional training is required besides a few tweaks to the prompt so that it outputs just the description, without any "fluff". E.g. it normally prepends such outputs with "Here's a description of the image:" unless you really insist that it should output only the description. I suppose I could use constrained decoding into JSON or something to achieve the same, but I didn't mess with that.
On some images where Gemma3 struggles Mistral Small produces better descriptions, BTW. But it seems harder to make it follow my instructions exactly.
I'm looking forward to the day when I can also do this with videos, a lot of which I also have no interest in uploading to someone else's computer.
Search is indeed hit and miss. Immich, for instance, currently does absolutely nothing with the EXIF "description" field, so I store textual descriptions on the side as well. I have found Immich's search by image embeddings to be pretty weak at recall, and even weaker at ranking. IIRC Lightroom Classic (which I also use, but haven't found a way to automate this for without writing an extension) does search that field, but ranking is a bit of a dumpster fire, so your best bet is searching uncommon terms or constraining search by metadata (e.g. not just "black kitten" but "black kitten AND 2025"). I expect this to improve significantly over time - it's a fairly obvious thing to add given the available tech.
I was thinking of doing the same, but I would like to include people's name. in the description. For example "Jennifer looking out in the desert sky.".
As it stands, Gemma will just say "Woman looking out in the desert sky."
Most search rankers do not consider word order, so if you could also append the person's name at the end of text description, it'd probably work well enough for retrieval and ranking at least.
If you want natural language to resolve the names, that'd at a minimum require bounding boxes of the faces and their corresponding names. It'd also require either preprocessing, or specialized training, or both. To my knowledge no locally-hostable model as of today has that. I don't know if any proprietary models can do this either, but it's certainly worth a try - they might just do it. The vast majority of the things they can do is emergent, meaning they were never specifically trained to do them.
> More and more I start to realize that cost saving is a small problem for local LLMs. If it is too slow, it becomes unusable, so much that you might as well use public LLM endpoints. Unless you really care about getting things done locally without sending information to another server.
There is another aspect to consider, aside from privacy.
These models are trained by downloading every scrap of information from the internet, including the works of many, many authors who have never consented to that. And they for sure are not going to get a share of the profits, if there is every going to be any. If you use a cloud provider, you are basically saying that is all fine. You are happy to pay them, and make yourself dependent on their service, based on work that wasn't theirs to use.
However, if you use a local model, the authors still did not give consent, but one could argue that the company that made the model is at least giving back to the community. They don't get any money out of it, and you are not becoming dependent on their hyper capitalist service. No rent-seeking. The benefits of the work are free to use for everyone. This makes using AI a little more acceptable from a moral standpoint.
Thanks for the call out on this model! I have 42gb usable VRAM on my ancient (~10yrs old) quad-sli titan-x workstation and have been looking for a model to balance large context window with output quality. I'm able to run this model with a 56K context window and it just fits into my 42gb VRAM to run 100% GPU. The output quality is really good and 56K context window is very usable. Nice find!
The original gemma3:27b also took only 22GB using Ollama on my 64GB MacBook. I'm quite confused that the QAT took the same. Do you know why?
Which model is better? `gemma3:27b`, or `gemma3:27b-qat`?
Both versions are quantized and should use the same amount of RAM, the difference with QAT is the quantization happens during training time and it should result in slightly better (closer to the bf16 weights) output
Quantization aware training just means having the model deal with quantized values a bit during training so it handles the quantization better when it is quantized after training/etc. It doesn't change the model size itself.
I don't think ollama is quantizing the embeddings table, which is still full FP16.
If you're using MLX, that means you're on a mac, in which case ollama actually isn't your best option. Either directly use llama.cpp if you're a power user, or use LM Studio if you want something a bit better than ollama but more user friendly than llama.cpp. (LM Studio has a GUI and is also more user friendly than ollama, but has the downsides of not being as scriptable. You win some, you lose some.)
Don't use MLX, it's not as fast/small as the best GGUFs currently (and also tends to be more buggy, it currently has some known bugs with japanese). Download the LM Studio version of the Gemma 3 QAT GGUF quants, which are made by Bartowski. Google actually directly mentions Bartowski in blog post linked above (ctrl-f his name), and his models are currently the best ones to use.
The "best Gemma 3 27b model to download" crown has taken a very roundabout path. After the initial Google release, it went from Unsloth Q4_K_M, to Google QAT Q4_0, to stduhpf Q4_0_S, to Bartowski Q4_0 now.
On my M1 Max macbook pro, the GGUF version bartowski/google_gemma-3-27b-it-qat-GGUF is 15.6gb and runs at 17tok/sec, whereas mlx-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-4bit is 16.8gb and runs at 15tok/sec. Note that both of these are the new QAT 4bit quants.
Yes, but I don't really know anything about those. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ is full of people running models on PCs with NVIDIA cards.
The unique benefit of an Apple Silicon Mac at the moment is that the 64GB of RAM is available to both the GPU and the CPU at once. With other hardware you usually need dedicated separate VRAM for the GPU.
Anything with the Radeon 8060S/Ryzen AI Max+ 395. One of the popular MiniPC Chinese brands has them for preorder[0] with shipping starting May 7th. Framework also has them, but shipping Q3.
Been super impressed with local models on mac. Love that the gemma models have 128k token context input size. However, outputs are usually pretty short
Any tips on generating long output? Like multiple pages of a document, a story, a play or even a book?
Been playing with that, but doesn’t seem to have much effect. It works very well to limit output to smaller bits, like setting it to 100-200. But above 2-4k the output seems to never get longer than about 1 page
Might try using the models with mlx instead of ollama to see if that makes a difference
Any tips on prompting to get longer outputs?
Also, does the model context size determine max output size? Are the two related or are they independent characteristics of the model?
> Total output context up to 128K tokens for the 4B, 12B, and 27B sizes, and 32K tokens for the 1B size per request, subtracting the request input tokens
I don't know how to get it to output anything that length though.
edit: just tried mistral3.1 and the quality of the output is very good, at least compared to the other models I tried (llama2:7b-chat, llama2:latest, gemma3:12b, qwq and deepseek-r1:14b)
Doing some research, because of their training sets, it seems like most models are not trained on producing long outputs so even if they technically could, they won’t. Might require developing my own training dataset and then doing some fine tuning. Apparently the models and ollama have some safeguards against rambling and repetition
You can probably find some long-form tuned models on HF. I've had decent results with QwQ-32B (which I can run on my desktop) and Mistral Large (which I have to run on my server). Generating and refining an outline before writing the whole piece can help, and you can also split the piece up into multiple outputs (working a paragraph or two at a time, for instance). So far I've found it to be a tough process, with mixed results.
I agree with you. The outputs are usually good, it’s just that for the use case I have now (writing several pages of long dialogs), the output is not as long as I’d want it, and definitely not as long as it’s supposedly capable of doing
Those are the same quant, but this is a good example of why you shouldn't use ollama. Either directly use llama.cpp, or use something like LM Studio if you want something with a GUI/easier user experience.
The Gemma 3 17b QAT GGUF should be taking up ~15gb, not 22gb.
I haven't tried it yet but there's an MLX project that exposes an OpenAI-compatible serving endpoint that should work with Open WebUI: https://github.com/madroidmaq/mlx-omni-server
I have a few private “vibe check” questions and the 4 bit QAT 27B model got them all correctly. I’m kind of shocked at the information density locked in just 13 GB of weights. If anyone at Deepmind is reading this — Gemma 3 27B is the single most impressive open source model I have ever used. Well done!
First graph is a comparison of the "Elo Score" while using "native" BF16 precision in various models, second graph is comparing VRAM usage between native BF16 precision and their QAT models, but since this method is about doing quantization while also maintaining quality, isn't the obvious graph of comparing the quality between BF16 and QAT missing? The text doesn't seem to talk about it either, yet it's basically the topic of the blog post.
Indeed, the one thing I was looking for was Elo/performance of the quantized models, not how good the base model is. Showing how much memory is saved by quantization in a figure is a bit of an insult to the intelligence of the reader.
In addition the graph "Massive VRAM Savings" graph states what looks like a tautology, reducing from 16 bits to 4 bits leads unsurprisingly to a x4 reduction in memory usage
Yea they mention a “perplexity drop” relative to naive quantization, but that’s meaningless to me.
> We reduce the perplexity drop by 54% (using llama.cpp perplexity evaluation) when quantizing down to Q4_0.
Wish they showed benchmarks / added quantized versions to the arena! :>
Indeed!! I have swapped out qwen2.5 for gemma3:27b-it-qat using Ollama for routine work on my 32G memory Mac.
gemma3:27b-it-qat with open-codex, running locally, is just amazingly useful, not only for Python dev, but for Haskell and Common Lisp also.
I still like Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3 for brainstorming or working on difficult problems, but for routine work it (simply) makes me feel good to have everything open source/weights running on my own system.
Wen I bought my 32G Mac a year ago, I didn't expect to be so happy as running gemma3:27b-it-qat with open-codex locally.
Fellow owner of a 32GB MBP here: how much memory does it use while resident - or, if swapping happens, do you see the effects in your day to day work? I’m in the awkward position of using on a daily basis a lot of virtualized bloated Windows software (mostly SAS).
I have the usual programs running on my Mac, along with open-codex: Emacs, web browser, terminals, VSCode, etc. Even with large contexts, open-codex with Ollama and Gemma 3 27B QAT does not seem to overload my system.
To be clear, I sometimes toggle open-codex to use the Gemini 3.5 Pro API also, but I enjoy running locally for simpler routine work.
Never mind, found your Leanpub book and followed the instructions and at least I have it running with qwen-2.5. I'll investigate what happens with Gemma.
Gemma 3 is way way better than Llama 4. I think Meta will start to lose its position in LLM mindshare. Another weakness of Llama 4 is its model size that is too large (even though it can run fast with MoE), which greatly limits the applicable users to a small percentage of enthusiasts who have enough GPU VRAM. Meanwhile, Gemma 3 is widely usable across all hardware sizes.
It seems pretty impressive - I'm running it on my CPU (16 core AMD 3950x) and it's very very impressive at translation, and the image description is very impressive as well. I'm getting about 2.3token/s on it (compared to under 1/s on the Calme-3.2 I was previously using).
It does tend to be a bit chatty unless you tell it not to be; pretty much everything it'll give you a 'breakdown' unless you tell it not to - so for traslation my prompt is 'Translate the input to English, only output the translation' to stop it giving a breakdown of the input language.
Mixture of experts like other guy said - everything gets loaded into mem but not every byte is needed to generate a token (unlike classic LLMs like gemma).
So for devices that have lots of mem but weaker processing power it can get you similar output quality but faster. So tends to do better on CPU and APU like setups
Also ~noone runs h100 at home, ie at batch size 1. What matters is throughput. With 37b active parameters and a massive deployment throughout (per gpu) should be similar to Gemma.
so what is the real comparison against DeepSeek r1 ? Would be good to know which is actually more cost efficient and open (reproducible build) to run locally.
It is funny that Microsoft had been peddling "AI PCs" and Apple had been peddling "made for Apple Intelligence" for a while now, when in fact usable models for consumer GPUs are only barely starting to be a thing on extremely high end GPUs like the 3090.
This is why the "AI hardware cycle is hype" crowd is so wrong. We're not even close, we're basically at ColecoVision/Atari stage of hardware here. It's going be quite a thing when everyone gets a SNES/Genesis.
AI PCs aren't about running the kind of models that take a 3090-class GPU, or even running on GPU at all, but systems where the local end is running something like Phi-3.5-vision-instruct, on system RAM using a CPU with an integrated NPU, which is why the AI PC requirements specify an NPU, a certain amount of processing capacity, and a minimum amount of DDR5/LPDDR5 system RAM.
A 3090 is not a extremely high end GPU. Is a consumer GPU launched in 2020, and even in price and compute it's around a mid-range consumer GPU these days.
The high end consumer card from Nvidia is the RTX 5090, and the professional version of the card is the RTX PRO 6000.
For model usability as a binary yes/no, pretty much the only dimension that matters is VRAM, and at 24GB the 3090 is still high end for a consumer NVidia GPUs, yes, the 5090 (and only the 5090) is above it, at 32GB, but 24GB is way ahead of the mid-range.
24 GB of VRAM is a large amount of VRAM on a consumer GPU, that I totally agree with you on. But it's definitely not an extremely high end GPU these days. It is suitable, yes, but not high end. The high end alternative for a consumer GPU would be the RTX 5090, but that is only available for €3000 now, while used 3090s are around €650.
A year ago, I bought a brand-new EVGA hybrid-cooled 3090 Ti for 700 euros. I'm still astonished at how good of a decision it was, especially considering the scarcity of 24GB cards available for a similar price. For pure gaming, many cards perform better, but they mostly come with 12 to 16GB of VRAM.
I am running this on 16 GB AMD Radeon 7900 GRE with 64 GB machine with ROCm and llama.cpp on Windows 11. I can use Open-webui or the native gui for the interface. It is made available via an internal IP to all members of my home.
It runs at around 26 tokens/sec and FP16, FP8 is not supported by the Radeon 7900 GRE.
I just love it.
For coding QwQ 32b is still king. But with a 16GB VRAM card it gives me ~3 tokens/sec, which is unusable.
I tried to make Gemma 3 write a powershell script with Terminal gui interface and it ran into dead-ends and finally gave up. QwQ 32B performed a lot better.
But for most general purposes it is great. My kid's been using it to feed his school textbooks and ask it questions. It is better than anything else currently.
Somehow it is more "uptight" than llama or the chinese models like Qwen. Can't put my finger on it, the Chinese models seem nicer and more talkative.
Just for fun I created a new personal benchmark for vision-enabled LLMs: playing minecraft. I used JSON structured output in LM Studio to create basic controls for the game. Unfortunately no matter how hard I proompted, gemma-3-27b QAT is not really able to understand simple minecraft scenarios. It would say things like "I'm now looking at a stone block. I need to break it" when it is looking out at the horizon in the desert.
i've found the vision capabilities are very bad with spatial awareness/reasoning. They seem to know that certain things are in the image, but not where they are relative to each other, their relative sizes, etc.
Thanks. I was wondering why my open-webui said that I already had the model. I bet a lot of people are making the same mistake I did and downloading just the old, post-quantized 27B.
How many times do I have to say this? Ollama, llamacpp, and many other projects are slower than vLLM/sglang. vLLM is a much superior inference engine and is fully supported by the only LLM frontends that matter (sillytavern).
The community getting obsessed with Ollama has done huge damage to the field, as it's ineffecient compared to vLLM. Many people can get far more tok/s than they think they could if only they knew the right tools.
The significant convenience benefits outweigh the higher TPS that vLLM offers in the context of my single machine homelab GPU server. If I was hosting it for something more critical than just myself and a few friends chatting with it, sure. Being able to just paste a model name into Open WebUI and run it is important to me though.
It is important to know about both to decide between the two for your use case though.
I tried sillytavern a few weeks ago... wow, that is an "interesting" UI! I blundered around for a while, couldn't figure out how to do anything useful... and then installed LM Studio instead.
Afaik vllm is for concurrent serving with batched inference for higher throughput, not single-user inference. I doubt inference throughput is higher with single prompts at a time than Ollama.
Update: this is a good Intro to continuous batching in llm inference: https://www.anyscale.com/blog/continuous-batching-llm-infere...
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.
In my opinion, your comment is not in line with the guidelines. Especially the part about sillytavern being the only LLM frontend that matters. Telling the devs of any LLM frontend except sillytavern that their app doesn't matter seems exactly like a shallow dismissal of other people's work to me.
I did not know this, so thank you. I read a blogpost a while back that encouraged using Ollama and never mention vLLM. Do you recommend reading any particular resource?
FWIW I'm getting 29 TPS on Ollama on my 7900 XTX with the 27b qat. You can't really compare inference engine to inference engine without keeping the hardware and model fixed.
Unfortunately Ollama and vLLM are therefore incomparable at the moment, because vLLM does not support these models yet.
What would be the best way to deploy this if you're maximizing for GPU utilization in a multi-user (API) scenario? Structured output support would be a big plus.
We're working with a GPU-poor organization with very strict data residency requirements, and these models might be exactly what we need.
I would normally say VLLM, but the blog post notably does not mention VLLM support.
I don't get the appeal. For LLMs to be useful at all you at least need to bin the the dozen exabit range per token, zettabit/s if you want something usable.
There is really no technological path towards supercomputers that fast in a human timescale and in 100 years.
The thing that makes LLMs usefull is their ability to translate concepts from one domain to the other. Overfitting on choice benchmarks, even a spread, will lower their usefullness in every general task by destorying infomation that is encoded in the weights.
Ask gemma to write a 5 paragraph essay on any niche topic and you will get plenty of statements that have an extremely small likely of existing in relation to the topic, but have a high likely of existing in related more popular topics. ChatGPT less so, but still at least one a paragraph. I'm not talking about factual errors or common oversimplifications. I'm talking about completely unrelated statements. What your asking about is largely outside it's training data of which a 27GB models gives you what? a few hundred Gigs? Seems like alot, but you have to remember that there is a lot of stuff that you probably don't care about that many people do. Stainless steel and Kubernetes are going to be well represented, your favorite media? probably not, relatively current? definitely not. Which sounds fine, until you realize that people who care about Stainless steel and Kubernetes, likely care about some much more specific aspect which isn't going to be represented and you are back to the same problem of low usability.
This is why I believe that scale is king and that both data and compute are the big walls. Google has Youtube data but they are only using it in Gemini.
With a 128K context length and 8 bit KV cache, the 27b model occupies 22 GiB on my system. With a smaller context length you should be able to fit it on a 16 GiB GPU.
Definitely my current fav. Also interesting that for many questions the response is very similar to the gemini series. Must be sharing training datasets pretty directly.
I am currently using the Q4_K_M quantized version of gemma-3-27b-it locally. I previously assumed that a 27B model with image input support wouldn't be very high quality, but after actually using it, the generated responses feel better than those from my previously used DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B (Q4_K_M), and its recognition of images is also stronger than I expected. (I thought the model could only roughly understand the concepts in the image, but I didn't expect it to be able to recognize text within the image.)
Since this article publishes the optimized Q4 quantized version, it would be great if it included more comparisons between the new version and my currently used unoptimized Q4 version (such as benchmark scores).
(I deliberately wrote this reply in Chinese and had gemma-3-27b-it Q4_K_M translate it into English.)
Assuming this can match Claude's latest, and full time usage ( as in you have a system that's constantly running code without any user input,) you'd probably save 600 to 700 a month. A 4090 is only 2K and you'll see an ROI within 90 days.
I can imagine this will serve to drive prices for hosted llms lower.
At this level any company that produces even a nominal amount of code should be running LMS on prem( AWS if your on the cloud).
I'd say using a Mac studio with M4 Max and 128 GB RAM will get you way further than 4090 in context size and model size. Cheaper than 2x4090 and less power while being a great overall machine.
I think these consumer GPUs are way too expensive for the amount of memory they pack - and that's intentional price discrimination. Also the builds are gimmicky. It's just not setup for AI models, and the versions that are cost 20k.
AMD has that 128GB RAM strix halo chip but even with soldered ram the bandwidth there is very limited, half of M4 Max, which is half of 4090.
I think this generation of hardware and local models is not there yet - would wait for M5/M6 release.
There's certainly room to grow but I'm running Gemma 12b on a 4060 (8GB VRAM) which I bought for gaming and it's a tad slow but still gives excellent results. And it certainly seems software is outpacing hardware right now. The target is making a good enough model that can run on a phone.
Very excited to see these kinds of techniques, I think getting a 30B level reasoning model usable on consumer hardware is going to be a game changer, especially if it uses less power.
Except this being lighter than the other models, is there anything else the Gemma model is specifically good at or better than the other models at doing?
I have found Gemma models are able to produce useful information about more niche subjects that other models like Mistral Small cannot, at the expense of never really saying "I don't know", where other models will, and will instead produce false information.
For example, if I ask mistral small who I am by name, it will say there is no known notable figure by that name before the knowledge cutoff. Gemma 3 will say I am a well known <random profession> and make up facts. On the other hand, I have asked both about local organization in my area that I am involved with, and Gemma 3 could produce useful and factual information, where Mistral Small said it did not know.
They are multimodal. Havent tried the QAT one yet. But the gemma3s released a few weeks ago are pretty good at processing images and telling you details about what’s in them
Been using the 27B QAT model for batch processing 50K+ internal documents. The 128K context is game-changing for our legal review pipeline. Though I wish the token generation was faster - at 20tps it's still too slow for interactive use compared to Claude Opus.
With ollama you could offload a few layers to cpu if they don't fit in the VRAM. This will cost some performance ofcourse but it's much better than the alternative (everything on cpu)
I'm doing that with a 12GB card, ollama supports it out of the box.
For some reason, it only uses around 7GB of VRAM, probably due to how the layers are scheduled, maybe I could tweak something there, but didn't bother just for testing.
Obviously, perf depends on CPU, GPU and RAM, but on my machine (3060 + i5-13500) it's around 2 t/s.
I tried the 27b-iat model on a 4090m with 16gb vram with mostly default args via llama.cpp and it didn't fit - used up the vram and tried to use about 2gb of system ram: performance in this setup was < 5 tps.
I didn't realize that the context would require such so much memory. Is this KV caches? It would seem like a big advantage if this memory requirement could be reduced.
This is probably due to this: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/issues/12637. This GitHub issue is about interleaved sliding window attention (iSWA) not available in llama.cpp for Gemma 3. This could reduce the memory requirements a lot. They mentioned for a certain scenario, going from 62GB to 10GB.
Resolving that issue, would help reduce (not eliminate) the size of the context. The model will still only just barely fit in 16 GB, which is what the parent comment asked.
Best to have two or more low-end, 16GB GPUs for a total of 32GB VRAM to run most of the better local models.
I answered the question directly. IQ4_X_S is smaller, but slower and less accurate than Q4_0. The parent comment specifically asked about the QAT version. That's literally what this thread is about. The context-length mention was relevant to show how it's only barely usable.
When I see 32B or 70B models performing similarly to 200+B models, I don’t know what to make of this. Either the latter contains more breadth of information but we have managed to distill latent capabilities to be similar, the larger models are just less efficient, or the tests are not very good.
It makes intuitive sense to me that this would be possible, because LLMs are still mostly opaque black boxes. I expect you could drop a whole hunch of the weights without having a huge impact on quality - maybe you end up mostly ditching the parts that are derived from shitposts on Reddit but keep the bits from Arxiv for example.
(That's a massive simplification of how any of this works, but it's how I think about it at a high level.)
its just bs benchmarks. they are all cheating at this point feeding the data in the training set. doesnt mean the llm arent becoming better but when they all lie...
Anyone packaged one of these in an iPhone App? I am sure it is doable, but I am curious what tokens/sec is possible these days. I would love to ship "private" AI Apps if we can get reasonable tokens/sec.
There are many such apps, e.g. Mollama, Enclave AI or PrivateLLM or dozens of others, but you could tell me it runs at 1,000,000 tokens/second on an iPhone and I wouldn't care because the largest model version you're going to be able to load is Gemma 3 4B q4 (12 B won't fit in 8 GB with the OS + you still need context) and it's just not worth the time to use.
That said, if you really care, it generates faster than reading speed (on an A18 based model at least).
The use case is more "I'm willing to have really bad answers that have extremely high rates of making things up" than based on the application. The same goes for summarization, it's not like it does it well like a large model would.
The qwq-2.5-0.5b is the tiniest useful model I've used, and pretty easy to fine-tune locally on a Mac. Haven't tried it on an iPhone, but given it runs at about 150-200 tokens/second on a Mac, I'm kinda doubtful it could do the same on an iPhone. But I guess you'd just have to try
This is my first time trying to locally host a model - gave both the 12B and 27B QAT models a shot.
I was both impressed and disappointed. Setup was piss easy, and the models are great conversationalists. I have a 12 gig card available and the 12B model ran very nice and swift.
However, they're seemingly terrible at actually assisting with stuff. Tried something very basic: asked for a powershell one liner to get the native blocksize of my disks. Ended up hallucinating fields, then telling me to go off into the deep end, first elevating to admin, then using WMI, then bringing up IOCTL. Pretty unfortunate. Not sure I'll be able to put it to actual meaningful use as a result.
I tried the 27B QAT model and it hallucinates like crazy. When I ask it for information about some made up person, restaurant, place name, etc., it never says "I don't know about that" and instead seems eager to just make up details.
The larger local models like the older Llama 3.3 70B seem better at this, but are also too big to fit on a 24GB GPU.
I think Powershell is a bad test. I've noticed all local models have trouble providing accurate responses to Powershell-related prompts. Strangely, even Microsoft's model, Phi 4, is bad at answering these questions without careful prompting. Though, MS can't even provide accurate PS docs.
My best guess is that there's not enough discussion/development related to Powershell in training data.
Local models, due to their size more than big cloud models, favor popular languages rather than more niche ones. They work fantastic for JavaScript, Python, Bash but much worse at less popular things like Clojure, Nim or Haskell. Powershell is probably on the less popular side compared to Js or Bash.
If this is your main use case you can always try to fine tune a model.
I maintain a small llm bench of different programming languages and the performance difference between say Python and Rust on some smaller models is up to 70%
nice, loving the push with local models lately - always makes me wonder though, you think privacy wins out over speed and convenience in the long run or people just stick with what's quickest?
Speed and convenience will definitely win for most people. Hosted LLMs are so cheap these days, and are massively more capable than anything you can fit on even a very beefy ($4,000+) consumer machine.
The privacy concerns are honestly mostly imaginary at this point, too. Plenty of hosted LLM vendors will promise not to train on your data. The bigger threat is if they themselves log data and then have a security incident, but honestly the risk that your own personal machine gets stolen or hacked is a lot higher than that.
These have been out for a while; if you follow the HF link you can see, for example, the 27b quant has been downloaded from HF 64,000 times over the last 10 days.
Is there something more to this, or is just a follow up blog post?
(is it just that ollama finally has partial (no images right?) support? Or something else?)
QAT “quantization aware training” means they had it quantized to 4 bits during training rather than after training in full or half precision. It’s supposedly a higher quality, but unfortunately they don’t show any comparisons between QAT and post-training quantization.
The partnership with Ollama and MLX and LM Studio and llama.cpp was revealed in that announcement, which made the models a lot easier for people to use.
I'm literally asking, quite honestly, if this is just an 'after the fact' update literally weeks later, that they uploaded a bunch of models, or if there is something more significant about this I'm missing.
Last time we only released the quantized GGUFs. Only llama.cpp users could use it (+ Ollama, but without vision).
Now, we released the unquantized checkpoints, so anyone can quantize themselves and use in their favorite tools, including Ollama with vision, MLX, LM Studio, etc. MLX folks also found that the model worked decently with 3 bits compared to naive 3-bit, so by releasing the unquantized checkpoints we allow further experimentation and research.
TL;DR. One was a release in a specific format/tool, we followed-up with a full release of artifacts that enable the community to do much more.
Given I know people running gemma3 on local devices for over almost a month now this is either a very slow news day or evidence of finger missing the pulse...
https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemma-3/
> Last month, we launched Gemma 3, our latest generation of open models. Delivering state-of-the-art performance, Gemma 3 quickly established itself as a leading model capable of running on a single high-end GPU like the NVIDIA H100 using its native BFloat16 (BF16) precision.
> To make Gemma 3 even more accessible, we are announcing new versions optimized with Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) that dramatically reduces memory requirements while maintaining high quality.
The thing that's new, and that is clearly resonating with people, is the "To make Gemma 3 even more accessible..." bit.
As I've said in my lectures on how to perform 1bit training of QAT systems to build classifiers...
"An iteration on a theme".
Once the network design is proven to work yes it's an impressive technical achievement, but as I've said given I've known people in multiple research institutes and companies using Gemma3 for a month mostly saying they're surprised it's not getting noticed...
This is just enabling more users but the none QAT version will almost always perform better...
Speaking for myself, my downvotes are not because of the content of your arguments, but because your tone is consistently condescending and dismissive. Comments like “just pointing out the flooding obvious” come off as smug and combative rather than constructive.
HN works best when people engage in good faith, stay curious, and try to move the conversation forward. That kind of tone — even when technically accurate — discourages others from participating and derails meaningful discussion.
If you’re getting downvotes regularly, maybe it's worth considering how your comments are landing with others, not just whether they’re “right.”
My tone only switches once people get uppity. The original comment is on point and accurate, not combative and not insulting (unless the community seriously takes a 'lol'....
Tbh I give up writing that in response to this rant. My polite poke holds and it's non insulting so I'm not going to capitulate to those childish enough to not look inwards.
I think gemma-3-27b-it-qat-4bit is my new favorite local model - or at least it's right up there with Mistral Small 3.1 24B.
I've been trying it on an M2 64GB via both Ollama and MLX. It's very, very good, and it only uses ~22Gb (via Ollama) or ~15GB (MLX) leaving plenty of memory for running other apps.
Some notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/19/gemma-3-qat-models/
Last night I had it write me a complete plugin for my LLM tool like this:
It gave a solid response! https://gist.github.com/simonw/feccff6ce3254556b848c27333f52... - more notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/20/llm-fragments-github/Can you quote tps?
More and more I start to realize that cost saving is a small problem for local LLMs. If it is too slow, it becomes unusable, so much that you might as well use public LLM endpoints. Unless you really care about getting things done locally without sending information to another server.
With OpenAI API/ChatGPT, I get response much faster than I can read, and for simple question, it means I just need a glimpse of the response, copy & paste and get things done. Whereas on local LLM, I watch it painstakingly prints preambles that I don't care about, and get what I actually need after 20 seconds (on a fast GPU).
And I am not yet talking about context window etc.
I have been researching about how people integrate local LLMs in their workflows. My finding is that most people play with it for a short time and that's about it, and most people are much better off spending money on OpenAI credits (which can last a very long time with typical usage) than getting a beefed up Mac Studio or building a machine with 4090.
My tooling doesn't measure TPS yet. It feels snappy to me on MLX.
I agree that hosted models are usually a better option for most people - much faster, higher quality, handle longer inputs, really cheap.
I enjoy local models for research and for the occasional offline scenario.
I'm also interested in their applications for journalism, specifically for dealing with extremely sensitive data like leaked information from confidential sources.
>I'm also interested in their applications for journalism, specifically for dealing with extremely sensitive data like leaked information from confidential sources.
Think it is NOT just you. Most company with decent management also would not want their data going to anything outside the physical server they have in control of. But yeah for most people just use an app and hosted server. But this is HN,there are ppl here hosting their own email servers, so shouldn't be too hard to run llm locally.
"Most company with decent management also would not want their data going to anything outside the physical server they have in control of."
I don't think that's been true for over a decade: AWS wouldn't be trillion dollar business if most companies still wanted to stay on-premise.
Yeah, this has been confusing me a bit. I'm not complaining by ANY means, but why does it suddenly feel like everyone cares about data privacy in LLM contexts, way more than previous attitudes to allowing data to sit on a bunch of random SaaS products?
I assume because of the assumption that the AI companies will train off of your data, causing it to leak? But I thought all these services had enterprise tiers where they'll promise not to do that?
Again, I'm not complaining, it's good to see people caring about where their data goes. Just interesting that they care now, but not before. (In some ways LLMs should be one of the safer services, since they don't even really need to store any data, they can delete it after the query or conversation is over.)
It is due to the risk of a leak.
Laundering of data through training makes it a more complicated case than a simple data theft or copyright infringement.
Leaks could be accidental, e.g. due to an employee logging in to their free-as-in-labor personal account instead of a no-training Enterprise account. It's safer to have a complete ban on providers that may collect data for training.
Their entire business model based on taking other peoples stuff. I cant imagine someone would willingly drown with the sinking ship if the entire cargo is filled with lifeboats - just because they promised they would.
How can you be sure that AWS will not use your data to train their models? They got enormous data, probably most data in the world.
Being caught doing they would be wildly harmful to their business - billions of dollars harmful, especially given the contracts they sign with their customers. The brand damage would be unimaginably expensive too.
There is no world in which training on customer data without permission would be worth it for AWS.
Your data really isn't that useful anyway.
> Your data really isn't that useful anyway
? One single random document, maybe, but as an aggregate, I understood some parties were trying to scrape indiscriminately - the "big data" way. And if some of that input is sensitive, and is stored somewhere in the NN, it may come out in an output - in theory...
Actually I never researched the details of the potential phenomenon - that anything personal may be stored (not just George III but Random Randy) -, but it seems possible.
There's a pretty common misconception that training LLMs is about loading in as much data as possible no matter the source.
That might have been true a few years ago but today the top AI labs are all focusing on quality: they're trying to find the best possible sources of high quality tokens, not randomly dumping in anything they can obtain.
Andrej Karpathy said this last year: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1797313173449764933
> Turns out that LLMs learn a lot better and faster from educational content as well. This is partly because the average Common Crawl article (internet pages) is not of very high value and distracts the training, packing in too much irrelevant information. The average webpage on the internet is so random and terrible it's not even clear how prior LLMs learn anything at all.
Obviously the training data should be preferably high quality - but there you have a (pseudo-, I insisted also elsewhere citing the rights to have read whatever is in any public library) problem with "copyright".
If there exists some advantage on quantity though, then achieving high quality imposes questions about tradeoffs and workflows - sources where authors are "free participants" could have odd data sip in.
And the matter of whether such data may be reflected in outputs remains as a question (probably tackled by some I have not read... Ars longa, vita brevis).
In Scandinavian financial related severs must in the country! That always sounded like a sane approach. The whole putting your data on saas or AWS just seems like the same "Let's shift the responsibility to a big player".
Any important data should NOT be in devices that is NOT physically with in our jurisdiction.
Or GitHub. I’m always amused when people don’t want to send fractions of their code to a LLM but happily host it on GitHub. All big llm providers offer no-training-on-your-data business plans.
> I’m always amused when people don’t want to send fractions of their code to a LLM but happily host it on GitHub
What amuses me even more is people thinking their code is too unique and precious, and that GitHub/Microsoft wants to steal it.
Concern about platform risk in regard to Microsoft is historically justified.
Unlikely they think Microsoft or GitHub wants to steal it.
With LLMs, they're thinking of examples that regurgitated proprietary code, and contrary to everyday general observation, valuable proprietary code does exist.
But with GitHub, the thinking is generally the opposite: the worry is that the code is terrible, and seeing it would be like giant blinkenlights* indicating the way in.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights
Regulations sometimes matter. Stupid "security" rules sometimes matter too.
While none of that is false, I think there's a big difference from shipping your data to an external LLM API and using AWS.
Using AWS is basically a "physical server they have control of".
That's why AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI and Azure AI model inference exist - they're all hosted LLM services that offer the same compliance guarantees that you get from regular AWS-style hosting agreements.
As in aws is a much bigger security concern?
on-premises
https://twominenglish.com/premise-vs-premises/
AWS has a strong track record, a clear business model that isn’t predicated on gathering as much data as possible, and an awful lot to lose if they break their promises.
Lots of AI companies have some of these, but not to the same extent.
> "Most company with decent management also would not want their data going to anything outside the physical server they have in control of."
Most companies physical and digital security controls are so much worst than anything from AWS or Google. Note I dont include Azure...but a physical server they have control of is a phrase that screams vulnerability.
> specifically for dealing with extremely sensitive data like leaked information from confidential sources.
Can you explain this further? It seems in contrast to your previous comment about trusting Anthropic with your data
I trust Anthropic not to train on my data.
If they get hit by a government subpoena because a journalist has been using them to analyze leaked corporate or government secret files I also trust them to honor that subpoena.
Sometimes journalists deal with material that they cannot risk leaving their own machine.
"News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress"
> Whereas on local LLM, I watch it painstakingly prints preambles that I don't care about, and get what I actually need after 20 seconds.
You may need to "right-size" the models you use to match your hardware, model, and TPS expectations, which may involve using a smaller version of the model with faster TPS, upgrading your jardware, or paying for hosted models.
Alternatively, if you can use agentic workflows or tools like Aider, you don't have to watch the model work slowly with large modles locally. Instead you queue work for it, go to sleep, or eat, or do other work, and then much later look over the Pull Requests whenever it completes them.
I have a 4070 super for gaming, and used it to play with LLM a few times. It is by no means a bad card, but I realize that unless I want to get 4090 or new Macs that I don't have any other use for, I can only use it to run smaller models. However, most smaller models aren't satisfactory and are still slower than hosted LLMs. I haven't found a model that I am happy with for my hardware.
Regarding agentic workflows -- sounds nice but I am too scared to try it out, based on my experience with standard LLMs like GPT or Claude for writing code. Small snippets or filling in missing unit tests, fine, anything more complicated? Has been a disaster for me.
As I understand it, these models are limited on GPU memory far more than GPU compute. You’d be better off with dual 4070s than with a single 4090 unless the 4090 has more RAM than the other two combined.
I have never found any agent able to put together sensible pull requests without constant hand holding. I shudder to think of what those repositories must look like.
Sometimes TPS doesn't matter. I've generated textual descriptions for 100K or so images in my photo archive, some of which I have absolutely no interest in uploading to someone else's computer. This works pretty well with Gemma. I use local LLMs all the time for things where privacy is even remotely important. I estimate this constitutes easily a quarter of my LLM usage.
This is a really cool idea. Do you pretrain the model so it can tag people? I have so many photo's that it seems impossible to ever categorize them,using a workflow like yours might help a lot
No, tagging of people is already handled by another model. Gemma just describes what's in the image, and produces a comma separated list of keywords. No additional training is required besides a few tweaks to the prompt so that it outputs just the description, without any "fluff". E.g. it normally prepends such outputs with "Here's a description of the image:" unless you really insist that it should output only the description. I suppose I could use constrained decoding into JSON or something to achieve the same, but I didn't mess with that.
On some images where Gemma3 struggles Mistral Small produces better descriptions, BTW. But it seems harder to make it follow my instructions exactly.
I'm looking forward to the day when I can also do this with videos, a lot of which I also have no interest in uploading to someone else's computer.
Since you already seem to have done some impressive work on this for your personal use, would you mind open sourcing it?
> No, tagging of people is already handled by another model.
As an aside, what model/tools do you prefer for tagging people?
How do you use the keywords after? I have Immich running which does some analysis, but the querying is a bit of a hit and miss.
Search is indeed hit and miss. Immich, for instance, currently does absolutely nothing with the EXIF "description" field, so I store textual descriptions on the side as well. I have found Immich's search by image embeddings to be pretty weak at recall, and even weaker at ranking. IIRC Lightroom Classic (which I also use, but haven't found a way to automate this for without writing an extension) does search that field, but ranking is a bit of a dumpster fire, so your best bet is searching uncommon terms or constraining search by metadata (e.g. not just "black kitten" but "black kitten AND 2025"). I expect this to improve significantly over time - it's a fairly obvious thing to add given the available tech.
I was thinking of doing the same, but I would like to include people's name. in the description. For example "Jennifer looking out in the desert sky.".
As it stands, Gemma will just say "Woman looking out in the desert sky."
Most search rankers do not consider word order, so if you could also append the person's name at the end of text description, it'd probably work well enough for retrieval and ranking at least.
If you want natural language to resolve the names, that'd at a minimum require bounding boxes of the faces and their corresponding names. It'd also require either preprocessing, or specialized training, or both. To my knowledge no locally-hostable model as of today has that. I don't know if any proprietary models can do this either, but it's certainly worth a try - they might just do it. The vast majority of the things they can do is emergent, meaning they were never specifically trained to do them.
Not sure how accurate my stats are. I used ollama with the --verbose flag. Using a 4090 and all default settings, I get 40TPS for Gemma 29B model
`ollama run gemma3:27b --verbose` gives me 42.5 TPS +-0.3TPS
`ollama run gemma3:27b-it-qat --verbose` gives me 41.5 TPS +-0.3TPS
Strange results; the full model gives me slightly more TPS.
ollama's `gemma3:27b` is also 4-bit quantized, you need `27b-it-q8_0` for 8 bit or `27b-it-fp16` for FP16. See https://ollama.com/library/gemma3/tags.
The local LLM is your project manager, the big remote ones are the engineers and designers :D
On a M4 Max 128GB via LM Studio:
query: "make me a snake game in python with pygame"
(mlx 4 bit quant) mlx-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat@4bit: 26.39 tok/sec • 1681 tokens 0.63s to first token
(gguf 4 bit quant) lmstudio-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat: 22.72 tok/sec • 1866 tokens 0.49s to first token
using Unsloth's settings: https://docs.unsloth.ai/basics/tutorial-how-to-run-and-fine-...
I genuinely would have expected a $3,500+ setup to do better than just 10x pure-CPU on a AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS.
On an A5000 with 24GB, this model typically gets between 20 to 25 tps.
> Can you quote tps?
LLM Studio running on a Mac Studio M4 Max with 128GB, gemma-3-27B-it-QAT-Q4_0.gguf with a 4096 token context I get 8.89 tps.
Is QAT a different quantisation format to Q4_0? Can you try "gemma-3-27b-it-qat" for a model: https://lmstudio.ai/model/gemma-3-27b-it-qat
Thanks for your suggestion!
I think it was just the filename. I tried the model you suggested by opening it in LLMStudio and keep getting 8.3 tps.
Now this is raising my curiosity, is there anything else I could try and tweak to achieve better tps? Can it be related to being GGUF instead of MLX?
That's pretty terrible. I'm getting 18tok/sec Gemma 3 27b QAT on a M1 Max 32gb macbook.
Yeah, I know. Not sure if this due to something in LLM Studio or whatever.
I'm seeing ~38--42 tps on a 4090 in a fresh build of llama.cpp under Fedora 42 on my personal machine.
(-t 32 -ngl 100 -c 8192 -fa -ctk q8_0 -ctv q8_0 -m models/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-q4_0.gguf)
> More and more I start to realize that cost saving is a small problem for local LLMs. If it is too slow, it becomes unusable, so much that you might as well use public LLM endpoints. Unless you really care about getting things done locally without sending information to another server.
There is another aspect to consider, aside from privacy.
These models are trained by downloading every scrap of information from the internet, including the works of many, many authors who have never consented to that. And they for sure are not going to get a share of the profits, if there is every going to be any. If you use a cloud provider, you are basically saying that is all fine. You are happy to pay them, and make yourself dependent on their service, based on work that wasn't theirs to use.
However, if you use a local model, the authors still did not give consent, but one could argue that the company that made the model is at least giving back to the community. They don't get any money out of it, and you are not becoming dependent on their hyper capitalist service. No rent-seeking. The benefits of the work are free to use for everyone. This makes using AI a little more acceptable from a moral standpoint.
The only actually useful application of LLM's is processing large amounts of data for classification and/or summarizing purposes.
That's not the stuff you want to send to a public API, this is something you want as a 24/7 locally running batch job.
("AI assistant" is an evolutionary dead end, and Star Trek be damned.)
Thanks for the call out on this model! I have 42gb usable VRAM on my ancient (~10yrs old) quad-sli titan-x workstation and have been looking for a model to balance large context window with output quality. I'm able to run this model with a 56K context window and it just fits into my 42gb VRAM to run 100% GPU. The output quality is really good and 56K context window is very usable. Nice find!
The original gemma3:27b also took only 22GB using Ollama on my 64GB MacBook. I'm quite confused that the QAT took the same. Do you know why? Which model is better? `gemma3:27b`, or `gemma3:27b-qat`?
Both versions are quantized and should use the same amount of RAM, the difference with QAT is the quantization happens during training time and it should result in slightly better (closer to the bf16 weights) output
Look up 27b in https://ollama.com/library/gemma3/tags
You'll find the id a418f5838eaf which also corresponds to 27b-it-q4_K_M
Quantization aware training just means having the model deal with quantized values a bit during training so it handles the quantization better when it is quantized after training/etc. It doesn't change the model size itself.
I suspect your "original gemma3:27b" was a quantized model since the non-quantized (16bit) version needs around 54gb.
> ~15GB (MLX) leaving plenty of memory for running other apps.
Is that small enough to run well (without thrashing) on a system with only 16GiB RAM?
I expect not. On my Mac at least I've found I need a bunch of GB free to have anything else running at all.
Any idea why MLX and ollama use such different amounts of ram?
I don't think ollama is quantizing the embeddings table, which is still full FP16.
If you're using MLX, that means you're on a mac, in which case ollama actually isn't your best option. Either directly use llama.cpp if you're a power user, or use LM Studio if you want something a bit better than ollama but more user friendly than llama.cpp. (LM Studio has a GUI and is also more user friendly than ollama, but has the downsides of not being as scriptable. You win some, you lose some.)
Don't use MLX, it's not as fast/small as the best GGUFs currently (and also tends to be more buggy, it currently has some known bugs with japanese). Download the LM Studio version of the Gemma 3 QAT GGUF quants, which are made by Bartowski. Google actually directly mentions Bartowski in blog post linked above (ctrl-f his name), and his models are currently the best ones to use.
https://huggingface.co/bartowski/google_gemma-3-27b-it-qat-G...
The "best Gemma 3 27b model to download" crown has taken a very roundabout path. After the initial Google release, it went from Unsloth Q4_K_M, to Google QAT Q4_0, to stduhpf Q4_0_S, to Bartowski Q4_0 now.
Simon, what is your local GPU setup? (No doubt you've covered this, but I'm not sure where to dig up).
MacBook Pro M2 with 64GB of RAM. That's why I tend to be limited to Ollama and MLX - stuff that requires NVIDIA doesn't work for me locally.
MLX is slower than GGUFs on Macs.
On my M1 Max macbook pro, the GGUF version bartowski/google_gemma-3-27b-it-qat-GGUF is 15.6gb and runs at 17tok/sec, whereas mlx-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-4bit is 16.8gb and runs at 15tok/sec. Note that both of these are the new QAT 4bit quants.
No, in general mlx versions are always faster, ice tested most of them.
What TPS difference are you getting?
> MacBook Pro M2 with 64GB of RAM
Are there non-mac options with similar capabilities?
Yes, but I don't really know anything about those. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ is full of people running models on PCs with NVIDIA cards.
The unique benefit of an Apple Silicon Mac at the moment is that the 64GB of RAM is available to both the GPU and the CPU at once. With other hardware you usually need dedicated separate VRAM for the GPU.
It’s not out yet, but the upcoming Framework desktop [0] is supposed to have a similar unified memory setup.
[0] https://frame.work/desktop
Anything with the Radeon 8060S/Ryzen AI Max+ 395. One of the popular MiniPC Chinese brands has them for preorder[0] with shipping starting May 7th. Framework also has them, but shipping Q3.
0: https://www.gmktec.com/products/prepaid-deposit-amd-ryzen™-a...
I've never been able to get ROCm working reliably personally.
Nvidia Orin AGX if a desktop form factor works for you.
I remember seeing a post about someone running the full size DeepSeek model in a dual-Xeon server with a ton of RAM.
Been super impressed with local models on mac. Love that the gemma models have 128k token context input size. However, outputs are usually pretty short
Any tips on generating long output? Like multiple pages of a document, a story, a play or even a book?
The tool you are using may set a default max output size without you realizing. Ollama has a num_ctx that defaults to 2048 for example: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/docs/faq.md#how-c...
Been playing with that, but doesn’t seem to have much effect. It works very well to limit output to smaller bits, like setting it to 100-200. But above 2-4k the output seems to never get longer than about 1 page
Might try using the models with mlx instead of ollama to see if that makes a difference
Any tips on prompting to get longer outputs?
Also, does the model context size determine max output size? Are the two related or are they independent characteristics of the model?
Interestingly the Gemma 3 docs say: https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/core/model_card_3#:~:text=T...
> Total output context up to 128K tokens for the 4B, 12B, and 27B sizes, and 32K tokens for the 1B size per request, subtracting the request input tokens
I don't know how to get it to output anything that length though.
Thank you for the insights and useful links
Will keep experimenting, will also try mistral3.1
edit: just tried mistral3.1 and the quality of the output is very good, at least compared to the other models I tried (llama2:7b-chat, llama2:latest, gemma3:12b, qwq and deepseek-r1:14b)
Doing some research, because of their training sets, it seems like most models are not trained on producing long outputs so even if they technically could, they won’t. Might require developing my own training dataset and then doing some fine tuning. Apparently the models and ollama have some safeguards against rambling and repetition
You can probably find some long-form tuned models on HF. I've had decent results with QwQ-32B (which I can run on my desktop) and Mistral Large (which I have to run on my server). Generating and refining an outline before writing the whole piece can help, and you can also split the piece up into multiple outputs (working a paragraph or two at a time, for instance). So far I've found it to be a tough process, with mixed results.
Thank you, will try out your suggestions
Have you used something like a director model to supervise the output? If so, could you comment on the effectiveness of it and potentially any tips?
Nope, sounds neat though. There's so much to keep up with in this space.
I'm using 12b and getting seriously verbose answers. It's squeezed into 8GB and takes its sweet time but answers are really solid.
This is basically the opposite of what I've experienced - at least compared to another recent entry like IBM's Granite 3.3.
By comparison, Gemma3's output (both 12b and 27b) seems to typically be more long/verbose, but not problematically so.
I agree with you. The outputs are usually good, it’s just that for the use case I have now (writing several pages of long dialogs), the output is not as long as I’d want it, and definitely not as long as it’s supposedly capable of doing
> and it only uses ~22Gb (via Ollama) or ~15GB (MLX)
Why is the memory use different? Are you using different context size in both set-ups?
No idea. MLX is its own thing, optimized for Apple Silicon. Ollama uses GGUFs.
https://ollama.com/library/gemma3:27b-it-qat says it's Q4_0. https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-4bit says it's 4bit. I think those are the same quantization?
Those are the same quant, but this is a good example of why you shouldn't use ollama. Either directly use llama.cpp, or use something like LM Studio if you want something with a GUI/easier user experience.
The Gemma 3 17b QAT GGUF should be taking up ~15gb, not 22gb.
The vision tower is 7GB, so I was wondering if you were loading it without vision?
Can you run the mlx-variation of this model through Ollama so that I can interact with it in Open WebUI?
I haven't tried it yet but there's an MLX project that exposes an OpenAI-compatible serving endpoint that should work with Open WebUI: https://github.com/madroidmaq/mlx-omni-server
Appreciate the link. I'll try to tinker with it later today.
Do many consumer GPUs have >20 gigabytes RAM? That sounds like a lot to me
I don't think so, but Apple's unified memory architecture makes it a possibility for people with Macbook Pros.
I have a few private “vibe check” questions and the 4 bit QAT 27B model got them all correctly. I’m kind of shocked at the information density locked in just 13 GB of weights. If anyone at Deepmind is reading this — Gemma 3 27B is the single most impressive open source model I have ever used. Well done!
I tried to use the -it models for translation, but it completely failed at translating adult content.
I think this means I either have to train the -pt model with my own instruction tuning or use another provider :(
Try mradermacher/amoral-gemma3-27B-v2-qat-GGUF
My current architecture is an on-device model for fast translation and then replace that with a slow translation (via an API call) when its ready.
24b would be too small to run on device and I'm trying to keep my cloud costs low (meaning I can't afford to host a small 27b 24/7).
Have you tried Mistral Small 24b?
My current architecture is an on-device model for fast translation and then replace that with a slow translation (via an API call) when its ready.
24b would be too small to run on device and I'm trying to keep my cloud costs low (meaning I can't afford to host a small 24b 24/7).
First graph is a comparison of the "Elo Score" while using "native" BF16 precision in various models, second graph is comparing VRAM usage between native BF16 precision and their QAT models, but since this method is about doing quantization while also maintaining quality, isn't the obvious graph of comparing the quality between BF16 and QAT missing? The text doesn't seem to talk about it either, yet it's basically the topic of the blog post.
Indeed, the one thing I was looking for was Elo/performance of the quantized models, not how good the base model is. Showing how much memory is saved by quantization in a figure is a bit of an insult to the intelligence of the reader.
In addition the graph "Massive VRAM Savings" graph states what looks like a tautology, reducing from 16 bits to 4 bits leads unsurprisingly to a x4 reduction in memory usage
Yea they mention a “perplexity drop” relative to naive quantization, but that’s meaningless to me. > We reduce the perplexity drop by 54% (using llama.cpp perplexity evaluation) when quantizing down to Q4_0.
Wish they showed benchmarks / added quantized versions to the arena! :>
Indeed!! I have swapped out qwen2.5 for gemma3:27b-it-qat using Ollama for routine work on my 32G memory Mac.
gemma3:27b-it-qat with open-codex, running locally, is just amazingly useful, not only for Python dev, but for Haskell and Common Lisp also.
I still like Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3 for brainstorming or working on difficult problems, but for routine work it (simply) makes me feel good to have everything open source/weights running on my own system.
Wen I bought my 32G Mac a year ago, I didn't expect to be so happy as running gemma3:27b-it-qat with open-codex locally.
Fellow owner of a 32GB MBP here: how much memory does it use while resident - or, if swapping happens, do you see the effects in your day to day work? I’m in the awkward position of using on a daily basis a lot of virtualized bloated Windows software (mostly SAS).
I have the usual programs running on my Mac, along with open-codex: Emacs, web browser, terminals, VSCode, etc. Even with large contexts, open-codex with Ollama and Gemma 3 27B QAT does not seem to overload my system.
To be clear, I sometimes toggle open-codex to use the Gemini 3.5 Pro API also, but I enjoy running locally for simpler routine work.
How did you manage to run open-codex against a local ollama? I keep getting 400 Errors no matter what I try with the --provider and --model options.
Never mind, found your Leanpub book and followed the instructions and at least I have it running with qwen-2.5. I'll investigate what happens with Gemma.
What tps are you hitting? And did you have to change KV size?
Gemma 3 is way way better than Llama 4. I think Meta will start to lose its position in LLM mindshare. Another weakness of Llama 4 is its model size that is too large (even though it can run fast with MoE), which greatly limits the applicable users to a small percentage of enthusiasts who have enough GPU VRAM. Meanwhile, Gemma 3 is widely usable across all hardware sizes.
It seems pretty impressive - I'm running it on my CPU (16 core AMD 3950x) and it's very very impressive at translation, and the image description is very impressive as well. I'm getting about 2.3token/s on it (compared to under 1/s on the Calme-3.2 I was previously using). It does tend to be a bit chatty unless you tell it not to be; pretty much everything it'll give you a 'breakdown' unless you tell it not to - so for traslation my prompt is 'Translate the input to English, only output the translation' to stop it giving a breakdown of the input language.
What are you using to run it? I haven't got image input working yet myself.
I'm using llama.cpp - built last night from head; to do image stuff you have to run a separate client they provide, with something like:
./build/bin/llama-gemma3-cli -m /discs/fast/ai/gemma-3-27b-it-q4_0.gguf --mmproj /discs/fast/ai/mmproj-model-f16-27B.gguf -p "Describe this image." --image ~/Downloads/surprise.png
Note the 2nd gguf in there - I'm not sure, but I think that's for encoding the image.
Image input has been working with LM Studio for quite some time
need it here for cli usage!
https://github.com/agustif/llm-lmstudio
The upcoming qwen3 series is supposed to be MoE...likely to give better tk/s on CPU
What's MoE?
Mixture of experts like other guy said - everything gets loaded into mem but not every byte is needed to generate a token (unlike classic LLMs like gemma).
So for devices that have lots of mem but weaker processing power it can get you similar output quality but faster. So tends to do better on CPU and APU like setups
I'm not even sure they're loading everything into memory for MoE; maybe they can get away with only the relevant experts being paged in.
Mixture of Experts. Very broadly speaking, there are a bunch of mini networks (experts) which can be independently activated.
This is what local LLMs need—being treated like first-class citizens by the companies that make them.
That said, the first graph is misleading about the number of H100s required to run DeepSeek r1 at FP16. The model is FP8.
Also ~noone runs h100 at home, ie at batch size 1. What matters is throughput. With 37b active parameters and a massive deployment throughout (per gpu) should be similar to Gemma.
so what is the real comparison against DeepSeek r1 ? Would be good to know which is actually more cost efficient and open (reproducible build) to run locally.
half the amount of those dots is what it takes. but also, why compare a 27B model with a +600B? that doesn't make sense.
It's an older image that they just reused for the blog post. It's on https://ai.google.dev/gemma for example
It is funny that Microsoft had been peddling "AI PCs" and Apple had been peddling "made for Apple Intelligence" for a while now, when in fact usable models for consumer GPUs are only barely starting to be a thing on extremely high end GPUs like the 3090.
This is why the "AI hardware cycle is hype" crowd is so wrong. We're not even close, we're basically at ColecoVision/Atari stage of hardware here. It's going be quite a thing when everyone gets a SNES/Genesis.
Capable local models have been usable on Macs for a while now thanks to their unified memory.
AI PCs aren't about running the kind of models that take a 3090-class GPU, or even running on GPU at all, but systems where the local end is running something like Phi-3.5-vision-instruct, on system RAM using a CPU with an integrated NPU, which is why the AI PC requirements specify an NPU, a certain amount of processing capacity, and a minimum amount of DDR5/LPDDR5 system RAM.
A 3090 is not a extremely high end GPU. Is a consumer GPU launched in 2020, and even in price and compute it's around a mid-range consumer GPU these days.
The high end consumer card from Nvidia is the RTX 5090, and the professional version of the card is the RTX PRO 6000.
For model usability as a binary yes/no, pretty much the only dimension that matters is VRAM, and at 24GB the 3090 is still high end for a consumer NVidia GPUs, yes, the 5090 (and only the 5090) is above it, at 32GB, but 24GB is way ahead of the mid-range.
24 GB of VRAM is a large amount of VRAM on a consumer GPU, that I totally agree with you on. But it's definitely not an extremely high end GPU these days. It is suitable, yes, but not high end. The high end alternative for a consumer GPU would be the RTX 5090, but that is only available for €3000 now, while used 3090s are around €650.
A 3090 still costs 1800€. Thats not mid-range by a long shot
The 5070 or 5070ti are mid range. They cost 650/900€.
3090s are no longer produced, that's why new ones are so expensive. At least here, used 3090s are around €650, and a RTX 5070 is around €625.
It's definitely not extremely high end any more, the price is(at least here) the same as the new mid range consumer cards.
I guess the price can vary by location, but €1800 for a 3090 is crazy, that's more than the new price in 2020.
A year ago, I bought a brand-new EVGA hybrid-cooled 3090 Ti for 700 euros. I'm still astonished at how good of a decision it was, especially considering the scarcity of 24GB cards available for a similar price. For pure gaming, many cards perform better, but they mostly come with 12 to 16GB of VRAM.
The speed gains are real, after downloading latest QAT gemma3:27b eval perf is now 1.47x faster on ollama, up from 13.72 to 20.11 tok/s (on A4000's).
I am running this on 16 GB AMD Radeon 7900 GRE with 64 GB machine with ROCm and llama.cpp on Windows 11. I can use Open-webui or the native gui for the interface. It is made available via an internal IP to all members of my home.
It runs at around 26 tokens/sec and FP16, FP8 is not supported by the Radeon 7900 GRE.
I just love it.
For coding QwQ 32b is still king. But with a 16GB VRAM card it gives me ~3 tokens/sec, which is unusable.
I tried to make Gemma 3 write a powershell script with Terminal gui interface and it ran into dead-ends and finally gave up. QwQ 32B performed a lot better.
But for most general purposes it is great. My kid's been using it to feed his school textbooks and ask it questions. It is better than anything else currently.
Somehow it is more "uptight" than llama or the chinese models like Qwen. Can't put my finger on it, the Chinese models seem nicer and more talkative.
> My kid's been using it to feed his school textbooks and ask it questions
Which method are you employing to feed a textbook into the model?
Just for fun I created a new personal benchmark for vision-enabled LLMs: playing minecraft. I used JSON structured output in LM Studio to create basic controls for the game. Unfortunately no matter how hard I proompted, gemma-3-27b QAT is not really able to understand simple minecraft scenarios. It would say things like "I'm now looking at a stone block. I need to break it" when it is looking out at the horizon in the desert.
Here is the JSON schema: https://pastebin.com/SiEJ6LEz System prompt: https://pastebin.com/R68QkfQu
i've found the vision capabilities are very bad with spatial awareness/reasoning. They seem to know that certain things are in the image, but not where they are relative to each other, their relative sizes, etc.
Available on ollama: https://ollama.com/library/gemma3
Make sure you're using the "-it-qat" suffixed models like "gemma3:27b-it-qat"
Here are the direct links:
https://ollama.com/library/gemma3:27b-it-qat
https://ollama.com/library/gemma3:12b-it-qat
https://ollama.com/library/gemma3:4b-it-qat
https://ollama.com/library/gemma3:1b-it-qat
Thanks. I was wondering why my open-webui said that I already had the model. I bet a lot of people are making the same mistake I did and downloading just the old, post-quantized 27B.
How many times do I have to say this? Ollama, llamacpp, and many other projects are slower than vLLM/sglang. vLLM is a much superior inference engine and is fully supported by the only LLM frontends that matter (sillytavern).
The community getting obsessed with Ollama has done huge damage to the field, as it's ineffecient compared to vLLM. Many people can get far more tok/s than they think they could if only they knew the right tools.
The significant convenience benefits outweigh the higher TPS that vLLM offers in the context of my single machine homelab GPU server. If I was hosting it for something more critical than just myself and a few friends chatting with it, sure. Being able to just paste a model name into Open WebUI and run it is important to me though.
It is important to know about both to decide between the two for your use case though.
Running any HF model on vllm is as simple as pasting a model name into one command in your terminal.
What command is it? Because that was not at all my experience.
Vllm serve… huggingface gives run instructions for every model with vllm on their website.
How do I serve multiple models? I can pick from dozens of models that I have downloaded through Open WebUI.
Had to build it from source to run on my Mac, and the experimental support doesn't seem to include these latest Gemma 3 QAT models on Apple Silicon.
instead of ranting, maybe explain how to make a qat q4 work with images in vllm, afaik it is not yet possible
Why is sillytavern the only LLM frontend which matters?
I tried sillytavern a few weeks ago... wow, that is an "interesting" UI! I blundered around for a while, couldn't figure out how to do anything useful... and then installed LM Studio instead.
I personally thought the lorebook feature was quite neat and then quickly gave up on it because I couldn't get it to trigger, ever.
Whatever those keyword things are, they certainly don't seem to be doing any form of RAG.
It supports more sampler and other settings than anyone else.
Last I looked vLLM didn't work on a Mac.
Afaik vllm is for concurrent serving with batched inference for higher throughput, not single-user inference. I doubt inference throughput is higher with single prompts at a time than Ollama. Update: this is a good Intro to continuous batching in llm inference: https://www.anyscale.com/blog/continuous-batching-llm-infere...
It is much faster on single prompts than ollama. 3X is not unheard of
From the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.
In my opinion, your comment is not in line with the guidelines. Especially the part about sillytavern being the only LLM frontend that matters. Telling the devs of any LLM frontend except sillytavern that their app doesn't matter seems exactly like a shallow dismissal of other people's work to me.
I did not know this, so thank you. I read a blogpost a while back that encouraged using Ollama and never mention vLLM. Do you recommend reading any particular resource?
Somebody in this thread mentioned 20.x tok/s on ollama. What are you seeing in vLLM?
FWIW I'm getting 29 TPS on Ollama on my 7900 XTX with the 27b qat. You can't really compare inference engine to inference engine without keeping the hardware and model fixed.
Unfortunately Ollama and vLLM are therefore incomparable at the moment, because vLLM does not support these models yet.
https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/issues/16856
Ollama is definitely not for production loads but vLLm is.
What would be the best way to deploy this if you're maximizing for GPU utilization in a multi-user (API) scenario? Structured output support would be a big plus.
We're working with a GPU-poor organization with very strict data residency requirements, and these models might be exactly what we need.
I would normally say VLLM, but the blog post notably does not mention VLLM support.
vLLM lists Gemma 3 as supported, if I'm not mistaken: https://docs.vllm.ai/en/latest/models/supported_models.html#...
I don't get the appeal. For LLMs to be useful at all you at least need to bin the the dozen exabit range per token, zettabit/s if you want something usable.
There is really no technological path towards supercomputers that fast in a human timescale and in 100 years.
The thing that makes LLMs usefull is their ability to translate concepts from one domain to the other. Overfitting on choice benchmarks, even a spread, will lower their usefullness in every general task by destorying infomation that is encoded in the weights.
Ask gemma to write a 5 paragraph essay on any niche topic and you will get plenty of statements that have an extremely small likely of existing in relation to the topic, but have a high likely of existing in related more popular topics. ChatGPT less so, but still at least one a paragraph. I'm not talking about factual errors or common oversimplifications. I'm talking about completely unrelated statements. What your asking about is largely outside it's training data of which a 27GB models gives you what? a few hundred Gigs? Seems like alot, but you have to remember that there is a lot of stuff that you probably don't care about that many people do. Stainless steel and Kubernetes are going to be well represented, your favorite media? probably not, relatively current? definitely not. Which sounds fine, until you realize that people who care about Stainless steel and Kubernetes, likely care about some much more specific aspect which isn't going to be represented and you are back to the same problem of low usability.
This is why I believe that scale is king and that both data and compute are the big walls. Google has Youtube data but they are only using it in Gemini.
They keep mentioning the RTX 3090 (with 24 GB VRAM), but the model is only 14.1 GB.
Shouldn’t it fit a 5060 Ti 16GB, for instance?
With a 128K context length and 8 bit KV cache, the 27b model occupies 22 GiB on my system. With a smaller context length you should be able to fit it on a 16 GiB GPU.
Memory is needed for more than just the parameters, e.g. the KV cache.
KV = key-value
Just checked - 19 gigs with 8k context @ q8 kv.Plus another 2.5-ish or so for OS etc.
...so yeah 3090
Definitely my current fav. Also interesting that for many questions the response is very similar to the gemini series. Must be sharing training datasets pretty directly.
I am currently using the Q4_K_M quantized version of gemma-3-27b-it locally. I previously assumed that a 27B model with image input support wouldn't be very high quality, but after actually using it, the generated responses feel better than those from my previously used DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B (Q4_K_M), and its recognition of images is also stronger than I expected. (I thought the model could only roughly understand the concepts in the image, but I didn't expect it to be able to recognize text within the image.)
Since this article publishes the optimized Q4 quantized version, it would be great if it included more comparisons between the new version and my currently used unoptimized Q4 version (such as benchmark scores).
(I deliberately wrote this reply in Chinese and had gemma-3-27b-it Q4_K_M translate it into English.)
Assuming this can match Claude's latest, and full time usage ( as in you have a system that's constantly running code without any user input,) you'd probably save 600 to 700 a month. A 4090 is only 2K and you'll see an ROI within 90 days.
I can imagine this will serve to drive prices for hosted llms lower.
At this level any company that produces even a nominal amount of code should be running LMS on prem( AWS if your on the cloud).
I'd say using a Mac studio with M4 Max and 128 GB RAM will get you way further than 4090 in context size and model size. Cheaper than 2x4090 and less power while being a great overall machine.
I think these consumer GPUs are way too expensive for the amount of memory they pack - and that's intentional price discrimination. Also the builds are gimmicky. It's just not setup for AI models, and the versions that are cost 20k.
AMD has that 128GB RAM strix halo chip but even with soldered ram the bandwidth there is very limited, half of M4 Max, which is half of 4090.
I think this generation of hardware and local models is not there yet - would wait for M5/M6 release.
There's certainly room to grow but I'm running Gemma 12b on a 4060 (8GB VRAM) which I bought for gaming and it's a tad slow but still gives excellent results. And it certainly seems software is outpacing hardware right now. The target is making a good enough model that can run on a phone.
two 3090 are the way to go
Meta Maverick is crying in the shower getting so handily beat by a model with 15x fewer params
Very excited to see these kinds of techniques, I think getting a 30B level reasoning model usable on consumer hardware is going to be a game changer, especially if it uses less power.
Deepseek does reasoning on my home Linux pc but not sure how power hungry it is
what variant? I’d considered DeepSeek far too large for any consumer GPUs
Some people run Deepseek on CPU. 37B active params - it isn't fast but it's passible.
Actual deepseek or some qwen/llama reasoning fine-tune?
Actual Deepseek. 500gb of memory and a threadripper works. Not a standard PC spec, but a common ish home brew setup for single user Deepseek.
Except this being lighter than the other models, is there anything else the Gemma model is specifically good at or better than the other models at doing?
I have found Gemma models are able to produce useful information about more niche subjects that other models like Mistral Small cannot, at the expense of never really saying "I don't know", where other models will, and will instead produce false information.
For example, if I ask mistral small who I am by name, it will say there is no known notable figure by that name before the knowledge cutoff. Gemma 3 will say I am a well known <random profession> and make up facts. On the other hand, I have asked both about local organization in my area that I am involved with, and Gemma 3 could produce useful and factual information, where Mistral Small said it did not know.
They are multimodal. Havent tried the QAT one yet. But the gemma3s released a few weeks ago are pretty good at processing images and telling you details about what’s in them
Google claims to have better multi language support, due tokenizer improvements.
Been using the 27B QAT model for batch processing 50K+ internal documents. The 128K context is game-changing for our legal review pipeline. Though I wish the token generation was faster - at 20tps it's still too slow for interactive use compared to Claude Opus.
Could 16gb vram be enough for the 27b QAT version?
With `ollama run gemma3:27b-it-qat "What is blue"`, GPU memory usage is just a hair over 20GB, so no, probably not without a nerfed context window
Indeed, the default context length in ollama is a mere 2048 tokens.
With ollama you could offload a few layers to cpu if they don't fit in the VRAM. This will cost some performance ofcourse but it's much better than the alternative (everything on cpu)
I'm doing that with a 12GB card, ollama supports it out of the box.
For some reason, it only uses around 7GB of VRAM, probably due to how the layers are scheduled, maybe I could tweak something there, but didn't bother just for testing.
Obviously, perf depends on CPU, GPU and RAM, but on my machine (3060 + i5-13500) it's around 2 t/s.
Does it work on LM Studio? Loading 27b-it-qat taking up more than 22GB on 24GB mac.
I tried the 27b-iat model on a 4090m with 16gb vram with mostly default args via llama.cpp and it didn't fit - used up the vram and tried to use about 2gb of system ram: performance in this setup was < 5 tps.
That's what the chart says yes. 14.1GB VRAM usage for the 27B model.
That's the VRAM required just to load the model weights.
To actually use a model, you need a context window. Realistically, you'll want a 20GB GPU or larger, depending on how many tokens you need.
I didn't realize that the context would require such so much memory. Is this KV caches? It would seem like a big advantage if this memory requirement could be reduced.
I am only able to get the Gemma-3-27b-it-qat-Q4_0.gguf (15.6GB) to run with a 100 token context size on a 5070 ti (16GB) using llamacpp.
Prompt Tokens: 10
Time: 229.089 ms
Speed: 43.7 t/s
Generation Tokens: 41
Time: 959.412 ms
Speed: 42.7 t/s
This is probably due to this: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/issues/12637. This GitHub issue is about interleaved sliding window attention (iSWA) not available in llama.cpp for Gemma 3. This could reduce the memory requirements a lot. They mentioned for a certain scenario, going from 62GB to 10GB.
Resolving that issue, would help reduce (not eliminate) the size of the context. The model will still only just barely fit in 16 GB, which is what the parent comment asked.
Best to have two or more low-end, 16GB GPUs for a total of 32GB VRAM to run most of the better local models.
Ollama supports iSWA.
I didn't realise the 5070 is slower than the 3090. Thanks.
If you want a bit more context, try -ctv q8 -ctk q8 (from memory so look it up) to quant the kv cache.
Also an imatrix gguf like iq4xs might be smaller with better quality
I answered the question directly. IQ4_X_S is smaller, but slower and less accurate than Q4_0. The parent comment specifically asked about the QAT version. That's literally what this thread is about. The context-length mention was relevant to show how it's only barely usable.
Try one of the smaller versions. 27b is too big for your gpu
I'm aware. I was addressing the question being asked.
On Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/collections/google/gemma-3-qat-67ee61...
When I see 32B or 70B models performing similarly to 200+B models, I don’t know what to make of this. Either the latter contains more breadth of information but we have managed to distill latent capabilities to be similar, the larger models are just less efficient, or the tests are not very good.
It makes intuitive sense to me that this would be possible, because LLMs are still mostly opaque black boxes. I expect you could drop a whole hunch of the weights without having a huge impact on quality - maybe you end up mostly ditching the parts that are derived from shitposts on Reddit but keep the bits from Arxiv for example.
(That's a massive simplification of how any of this works, but it's how I think about it at a high level.)
its just bs benchmarks. they are all cheating at this point feeding the data in the training set. doesnt mean the llm arent becoming better but when they all lie...
The normal Gemma models seem to work fine on Apple silicon with Metal. Am I missing something?
These new special editions of those models claim to work better with less memory.
Anyone packaged one of these in an iPhone App? I am sure it is doable, but I am curious what tokens/sec is possible these days. I would love to ship "private" AI Apps if we can get reasonable tokens/sec.
There are many such apps, e.g. Mollama, Enclave AI or PrivateLLM or dozens of others, but you could tell me it runs at 1,000,000 tokens/second on an iPhone and I wouldn't care because the largest model version you're going to be able to load is Gemma 3 4B q4 (12 B won't fit in 8 GB with the OS + you still need context) and it's just not worth the time to use.
That said, if you really care, it generates faster than reading speed (on an A18 based model at least).
Some of these small models still have their uses, e.g. for summarization. Don’t expect them to fully replace ChatGPT.
The use case is more "I'm willing to have really bad answers that have extremely high rates of making things up" than based on the application. The same goes for summarization, it's not like it does it well like a large model would.
FWIW, I can run Gemma-3-12b-it-qat on my Galaxy Fold 4 with 12Gb ram at around 1.5 tokens / s. I use plain llama.cpp with Termux.
Does this turn your phone into a personal space heater too?
If you ever ship a private AI app, don't forget to implement the export functionality, please!
You mean conversations? Just the jsonl of the standard hf dataset format to import into other systems?
Yeah I mean conversations.
What kind of functionality do you need from the model?
For basic conversation and RAG, you can use tinyllama or qwen-2.5-0.5b, both of which run on a raspberry pi at around 5-20 tokens per second
I am looking for structured output at about 100-200 tokens/second on iPhone 14+. Any pointers?
The qwq-2.5-0.5b is the tiniest useful model I've used, and pretty easy to fine-tune locally on a Mac. Haven't tried it on an iPhone, but given it runs at about 150-200 tokens/second on a Mac, I'm kinda doubtful it could do the same on an iPhone. But I guess you'd just have to try
Just tested the 27B, and it’s not very good at following instructions and is very limited on more complex code problems.
Mapping from one JSON with a lot of plain text, into a new structure and it fails every time.
Ask it to generate SVG, and it’s very simple and almost too dumb.
Nice that it doesn’t need that huge amount of RAM, and perform ok on smaller languages from my initial tests.
How does it compare to CodeGemma for programming tasks?
FWIW, the 27b Q4_K_M takes about 23Gb of VRAM with 4k context and 29Gb with 16k context and runs at ~61t/s on my 5090.
This is my first time trying to locally host a model - gave both the 12B and 27B QAT models a shot.
I was both impressed and disappointed. Setup was piss easy, and the models are great conversationalists. I have a 12 gig card available and the 12B model ran very nice and swift.
However, they're seemingly terrible at actually assisting with stuff. Tried something very basic: asked for a powershell one liner to get the native blocksize of my disks. Ended up hallucinating fields, then telling me to go off into the deep end, first elevating to admin, then using WMI, then bringing up IOCTL. Pretty unfortunate. Not sure I'll be able to put it to actual meaningful use as a result.
I tried the 27B QAT model and it hallucinates like crazy. When I ask it for information about some made up person, restaurant, place name, etc., it never says "I don't know about that" and instead seems eager to just make up details. The larger local models like the older Llama 3.3 70B seem better at this, but are also too big to fit on a 24GB GPU.
I think Powershell is a bad test. I've noticed all local models have trouble providing accurate responses to Powershell-related prompts. Strangely, even Microsoft's model, Phi 4, is bad at answering these questions without careful prompting. Though, MS can't even provide accurate PS docs.
My best guess is that there's not enough discussion/development related to Powershell in training data.
Which, like, you'd think Microsoft has an entire team there who's purpose would be to generate good PowerShell for it to train on.
Local models, due to their size more than big cloud models, favor popular languages rather than more niche ones. They work fantastic for JavaScript, Python, Bash but much worse at less popular things like Clojure, Nim or Haskell. Powershell is probably on the less popular side compared to Js or Bash.
If this is your main use case you can always try to fine tune a model. I maintain a small llm bench of different programming languages and the performance difference between say Python and Rust on some smaller models is up to 70%
How accessible and viable is model fine-tuning? I'm not in the loop at all unfortunately.
This is a very accessible way of playing around with the topic: https://transformerlab.ai
you should set a lower temperature
nice, loving the push with local models lately - always makes me wonder though, you think privacy wins out over speed and convenience in the long run or people just stick with what's quickest?
Speed and convenience will definitely win for most people. Hosted LLMs are so cheap these days, and are massively more capable than anything you can fit on even a very beefy ($4,000+) consumer machine.
The privacy concerns are honestly mostly imaginary at this point, too. Plenty of hosted LLM vendors will promise not to train on your data. The bigger threat is if they themselves log data and then have a security incident, but honestly the risk that your own personal machine gets stolen or hacked is a lot higher than that.
Is 27B the largest QAT Gemma 3? Given these size reductions, it would be amazing to have the 70B!
The original Gemma 3 does not have a 70B version.
Ah thank you
?
Am I missing something?
These have been out for a while; if you follow the HF link you can see, for example, the 27b quant has been downloaded from HF 64,000 times over the last 10 days.
Is there something more to this, or is just a follow up blog post?
(is it just that ollama finally has partial (no images right?) support? Or something else?)
QAT “quantization aware training” means they had it quantized to 4 bits during training rather than after training in full or half precision. It’s supposedly a higher quality, but unfortunately they don’t show any comparisons between QAT and post-training quantization.
I understand that, but the qat models (1) are not new uploads.
How is this more significant now than when they were uploaded 2 weeks ago?
Are we expecting new models? I don’t understand the timing. This post feels like it’s two weeks late.
[1] - https://huggingface.co/collections/google/gemma-3-qat-67ee61...
The official announcement of the QAT models happened on Friday 18th, two days ago. It looks like they uploaded them to HF in advance of that announcement: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/gemma-3-quantized-aware...
The partnership with Ollama and MLX and LM Studio and llama.cpp was revealed in that announcement, which made the models a lot easier for people to use.
8 days is closer to 1 week then 2. And it’s a blog post, nobody owes you realtime updates.
https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-q4_0-gguf/t...
> 17 days ago
Anywaaay...
I'm literally asking, quite honestly, if this is just an 'after the fact' update literally weeks later, that they uploaded a bunch of models, or if there is something more significant about this I'm missing.
Hi! Omar from the Gemma team here.
Last time we only released the quantized GGUFs. Only llama.cpp users could use it (+ Ollama, but without vision).
Now, we released the unquantized checkpoints, so anyone can quantize themselves and use in their favorite tools, including Ollama with vision, MLX, LM Studio, etc. MLX folks also found that the model worked decently with 3 bits compared to naive 3-bit, so by releasing the unquantized checkpoints we allow further experimentation and research.
TL;DR. One was a release in a specific format/tool, we followed-up with a full release of artifacts that enable the community to do much more.
Hey Omar, is there any chance that Gemma 3 might get a speech (ASR/AST/TTS) release?
Probably the former... I see your confusion but it's really only a couple weeks at most. The news cycle is strong in you, grasshopper :)
Ollama has had vision support for Gemma3 since it came out. The implementation is not based on llama.cpp's version.
The linked blog post was 2 days ago
So how does 27b-it-qat (18GB) compare to 27b-it-q4_K_M (17GB)?
anyone had success using Gemma 3 QAT models on Ollama with cline? They just don't work as good compared Gemini 2.0 flash provided by API
my trusty RTX 3060 is gonna have its day in the sun... though I have run a bunch of 7B models fairly easily on Ollama.
Is there already a Helium for GPUs?
Given how long between this being released and this community picking up on it... Lol
2days :/...
Given I know people running gemma3 on local devices for over almost a month now this is either a very slow news day or evidence of finger missing the pulse... https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemma-3/
This is new. These are new QAT (Quantization-Aware Training) models released by the Gemma team.
There's nothing more than an iteration on the topic, gemma3 was smashing local results a month ago and made no waves as it dropped...
Quoting the linked story:
> Last month, we launched Gemma 3, our latest generation of open models. Delivering state-of-the-art performance, Gemma 3 quickly established itself as a leading model capable of running on a single high-end GPU like the NVIDIA H100 using its native BFloat16 (BF16) precision.
> To make Gemma 3 even more accessible, we are announcing new versions optimized with Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) that dramatically reduces memory requirements while maintaining high quality.
The thing that's new, and that is clearly resonating with people, is the "To make Gemma 3 even more accessible..." bit.
As I've said in my lectures on how to perform 1bit training of QAT systems to build classifiers...
"An iteration on a theme".
Once the network design is proven to work yes it's an impressive technical achievement, but as I've said given I've known people in multiple research institutes and companies using Gemma3 for a month mostly saying they're surprised it's not getting noticed... This is just enabling more users but the none QAT version will almost always perform better...
Sounds like you're excited to see Gemma 3 get the recognition it deserves on Hacker News then.
No just pointing out the flooding obvious as usual and collecting down votes for it
Speaking for myself, my downvotes are not because of the content of your arguments, but because your tone is consistently condescending and dismissive. Comments like “just pointing out the flooding obvious” come off as smug and combative rather than constructive.
HN works best when people engage in good faith, stay curious, and try to move the conversation forward. That kind of tone — even when technically accurate — discourages others from participating and derails meaningful discussion.
If you’re getting downvotes regularly, maybe it's worth considering how your comments are landing with others, not just whether they’re “right.”
My tone only switches once people get uppity. The original comment is on point and accurate, not combative and not insulting (unless the community seriously takes a 'lol'....
Tbh I give up writing that in response to this rant. My polite poke holds and it's non insulting so I'm not going to capitulate to those childish enough to not look inwards.