AirLLM 70B inference with single 4GB GPU (github.com)
160 points by Anon84 9 hours ago
imenani 8 hours ago
For anyone wondering “how slow is this?”
IIUC, Kimi K3 on RTX 6000 Ada (48GB) takes 292 s/token
malshe 26 minutes ago
I hope I'm not the only one who misread it as 292 tokens/s and got excited momentarily
bensyverson 7 hours ago
I do think these “run a bigger model than will fit in VRAM” projects are necessary steps, but are they functionally useful or helpful to anyone currently? For example, is anyone out there running a big Qwen for coding on a 16-32GB machine with these techniques?
dsl 20 minutes ago
> but are they functionally useful or helpful to anyone currently?
I've been building a SaaS that deals with data that can't be distributed to third parties. Some of the useful AI stuff I can add is not time sensitive and can run overnight. Things like this allow me to use higher quality models without selling my house for GPUs.
pizza234 7 hours ago
> but are they functionally useful or helpful to anyone currently?
Yes and no, depend on your expectations. Some/many like to run local LLMs just for the sake of it, so anything will do.
MoE are useful on PC systems, at the condition of having high enough memory bandwidth (and large amounts of RAM) - that is, Threadripper/Pro.
The advantage of MoE is that only a subset of the model's experts is used for each token, so not all weights need to be present in VRAM at once. The remaining weights can reside in system RAM, although moving and accessing them still carries a substantial performance cost (and that's why high memory bandwidth is needed).
ddevnyc 6 hours ago
bensyverson 6 hours ago
zapataband1 37 minutes ago
I don't need any of these to help with coding. skill issue.
nickpsecurity 6 hours ago
If I could justify wear and tear and electricity, I was willing to do something like this for batch processing. The batches would be a bunch of prompts whose outputs I'd look at the next day. Maybe common operations, like QA or refactoring, on whatever software I wrote.
If so, I could use a larger model than I have real-time hardware for. The largest, well-trained models can often get the output mostly right in one try. I also would be using AI's as a supplement to, not replacement for, my own brain. So, issues with the outputs wouldn't be a problem because I'm just keeping what's helpful.
If I still need to re-generate it all, it might still save money over time by avoiding cloud costs. Also, hardware that's already paid for is a sunk cost that doesn't inflate over time. Glitches in loading or destroying VM's might blow up into a big bill.
parineum 4 hours ago
xg15 2 hours ago
At that point, how does this compare with simply running the model on the CPU?
root-parent 3 hours ago
It matches my coding speed...its ok.
jackb4040 7 hours ago
Ahaha thank you, I naively assumed the unlabeled graph in the readme was tps, not spt!
throwawayffffas 6 hours ago
Running 292 tps on K3 would make your gpu a money printer.
meneton 5 hours ago
xnorswap 7 hours ago
I wonder what this measures in J/token.
throwawayffffas 6 hours ago
Assuming 30% gpu power utilization because of all the loading and unloading 29.2 kJ per token
donquichotte 5 hours ago
mring33621 6 hours ago
How many is that in tokens per Scaramucci?
fhars 2 hours ago
It is a bit more than four tokens per millifortnight.
logicallee 6 hours ago
that's 0.003 tokens/second. To get an hour's work done that's normally 30 tokens/second (108k output tokens in an hour) will take 416 days at this rate. And if you're using 100 watts, during that time you will spend $124.61 in electricity, as well as not being able to use your device for something else, plus the noise and heat from your device.
For $124, on Moonshot's official Kimi K3 API rates ($0.30 per 1M cached input, $3 per 1M fresh input, $15 per 1M fresh output), you can purchase 42 million fresh-input tokens, or 8.3 million generated output tokens, in whatever mix you want.
So what you get is 80x more expensive and you wait 416 days to get it.
aaroninsf 3 hours ago
Wow, you could do a lot at 292 tokens a sec—oh.
I have all praise for those taking this on and in my idiom would call it *the lord's work."
The image I reliably summon to mind is that compilation video showing the progress of Boston Dynamics bots. The curve between technically functional, to comically slow, to too slow for "real" work, on to, OMFG, may prove a (rough) curve.
It's work like this that moves things forward.
exe34 5 hours ago
Hah I was looking for it and couldn't work out how many years/token. 292s is pretty good.
roger_ 7 hours ago
Seeing a lot of these “run 1TB models with 1GB RAM” projects recently. Most seem vibe coded and probably won’t be maintained.
Hoping a winner emerges with some real momentum behind it.
mkagenius 20 minutes ago
I love how goal posts are shifting from "vibe coded apps dont really work" to "vide coded projects wont be maintained"
hiramwen 7 hours ago
You don't really need a maintainer when codex or claude code can set it up for you; thats how I got Trellis2 working on windows and tiny VRAM despite Microsoft recommending you have 24GB VRAM and Linux. Models are pretty disposable now.
tecleandor 5 hours ago
So, instead of having one or two maintained projects that work super well, now we have hundreds or thousands of people half-assing it locally each time they need it? Doesn't sound efficient.
IAmGraydon 3 hours ago
esafak 3 hours ago
titularcomment 6 hours ago
This is complete dependency on LLM tools all the way from development to usage, and is risky as well as prone to failure
hiramwen 6 hours ago
akie 7 hours ago
No no, don't just say "vibe coded", say "Fable and $500 of credits"
ricardobayes an hour ago
Or Deepseek with a fiver.
Foobar8568 6 hours ago
Opus 4.6 was already enough to tackle these projects vibe coding.
gwerbin 5 hours ago
cyanydeez 2 hours ago
these things can be done with local models; so don't say 500$ credits, say "accelerated climate change disasters by $500/year"
Lalabadie 6 hours ago
"This one is made with premium vibes"
classified 7 hours ago
How a patchwork of Python modules constitutes an API(?) or whatever(?) and how to use it (does anyone?), is beyond me. There is nothing that I would call documentation, let alone concrete usage examples. I know more amusing ways to waste my time. When I want to play with models, I use llama.cpp.
seu 3 hours ago
I love it how the rampocalypse is pushing people to squash all the performance they can. I hope that this also leads to rethinking model architecture so that they can do the same with less.
cpfohl 8 hours ago
I’m still slightly confused on what this adds.
Let’s say I wanted to run a full size open weight model. I have a 128GB m3 max laptop.
Does this basically load layers in and out on demand? So I still have to download the full model to disk, but the RAM requirements go way down? The readme calls out that one still needs to connect HuggingFace, which leads me to believe that maybe you don’t even need to download the full model?
dofm 7 hours ago
If you point it at a huggingface model identifier, it will download it, I assume. No way around that.
It reads like it is keeping only the core and the active layer loaded at any one point, and streams layers from disk; there are several other solutions like this and if my understanding is right, this is probably better than an mmap implementation or just streaming experts in.
pvtmert 7 hours ago
Not an expert in this field, but the "expert" is consisting of multiple layers. To keep it small in terms of memory print, this project streams each layer (dividing even further).
It also requires extra space because of decomposition of the layers. Normally the file format optimized for compute intense workloads. But here the bottleneck is the memory capacity.
Also guessing that you need to be able to hold at least 3-layers at once in the memory, given M x N = R operation, M is the previous layer, N is next, and R is the result. on the next "layer", the R (result) becomes M, gets computed against the next layer, N, yielding the further result R'. And so on, until all layers are processed.
I assume it's horribly slow, but can be put in a non-intrusive background task...
dofm an hour ago
cpfohl 7 hours ago
Obviously needs downloading eventually :).
It seems like this tool saves on both disk space and RAM, then. Classic trade off: speed vs space.
jedbrooke 5 hours ago
xg15 2 hours ago
You can run any frontier model on your PC if you just wait long enough...
mrwaip 4 hours ago
What device do I need and how much will it cost to install one at home so that it works as quickly as the Claude Code answer (and it answers quite slowly)?
ilaksh 7 hours ago
I guess the use case is something like: you have a slightly obsolete Mac or PC or a whole bunch of them, and just need to compose one or more convincing spam emails, but it's fine if it takes a full week to do it?
speedgoose 7 hours ago
And you don’t pay for the electricity.
book_mike 7 hours ago
We will see if this project has legs. This is the kind of efficiency we desperately need. Now if we can address efficiency with llm training.
myshapeprotocol 7 hours ago
Running 70B on a 4GB GPU is wild. Really impressive engineering feat for resource-constrained environments.
hna8hjbqzy 8 hours ago
Same problem, different day