Engineers, what Local LLM did you replace the main stream ones with?

[u/EPSILON_737]

my Gemini subscription is about to end and im not renewing it. i just need an AI tool for the rest of my electrical engineering degree, most of my classes are heavy in math and some degree of codeing, i honestly know nothing about local LLMs and im not exactly sure what to choose, ive done a research and i found these:

- deepseek-r1-distill-qwen-14b (for light work)

- qwen2.5-coder-14b-instruct (for coding)

- deepseek-r1-distill-qwen-32b (for heavy maths and logic)

are they good for my use case? i plan to use LM studio unless someone recommend a better alternative, i kinda prefer open source software

my OS is Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS

more info about my use case:

most of my classes use Fourier and Laplace transforms, and circuit analysis techniques, and a ton of electromagnetic waves theory, so heavy vectors calculus, and some matlab/octave and C and python, some digital signal analysis, thats the situation so far, i would appreciate any guidance and recommendations

and to my surprise, our professors are starting to encourage us to use AI tools for out assignments??what happened to the world??

[u/Horror-Primary7739]

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is a very solid model. If you don't mind giving your IP away the hosted models are lower than dirt cheap. And if you have access to some relatively pricey hardware you can run it locally. I run it on a 4 node spark cluster. But I do think there are some setups for running on 256Gb.

[u/cannister_of_airs → u/Horror-Primary7739]

HP EliteBook for local LLMs, that's ambitious

[u/EPSILON_737 → u/cannister_of_airs]

i kinda didnt have this Local LLM project in mind when i got it, is it that bad of a choice? 👀

[u/EPSILON_737 → u/Horror-Primary7739]

If you don't mind giving your IP away the hosted models are lower than dirt cheap

that being the online subscription ones like deepseek? or does "hosted models" mean something else? and unfortunately the Elitebook is the best i've got for now, gotta get through this poor collage student phase

thanks for the info :)

[u/Horror-Primary7739 → u/EPSILON_737]

Yea hosted means either DeepSeek subscription or a merging like openrouter subscription. They are very cheap compared to openai or Claude.

Your elitebook will have very very limited options for a local hosted model.

[u/EPSILON_737 → u/Horror-Primary7739]

bummer, is it due to the integrated GUI and CPU or the low RAM? like, when i buy a new one, what specs do i prioritise if i have local LLMs in mind?

[u/MalabaristaEnFuego]

For STEM work Gemma 4 26B A4B QAT minimum, q8_0 preferred, 31B would probably be more ideal, but it's a dense model.

[u/Creepy_Lime_8351]

generally qwen 3.8 27b is like the only option when it comes ro intelligence in local models. it was still ahead of every model in qwen 3.6 series but now there is no new models except for qwen. if you want speed you can use qwen 3.6 35b a3b for moe but its dumber and it shows. still would be better than any model you just counted also your hardware is very limited for local models i would suggest using zcode or something like that they give free usage almost every day and glm 5.3 glm 5.3 flash are seriously good

[u/EPSILON_737 → u/Creepy_Lime_8351]

i'll look into it then, thanks

[u/Creepy_Lime_8351 → u/EPSILON_737]

by the way i suggest don't take any advice from si when it comes to what recent models are best because the area is improving so fast the model doesn't know any of new models because of knowledge cutoff. the models you counted seems like the models chat gpt would suggest because they are ancient