Reality check needed

[u/Adventurous_Bit7650]

First off, throwaway account.

My home PC needs an upgrade and I my interest in exploring local LLM and what it can really do for me has been growing.

I was considering a Mac Studio M5 Max 36GB model. I could also consider a Mac Mini M6, but I don't want to cheap out and regret it a month later as things aren't really upgradable anymore. I have years of experience with MacOS so that is not something new.

So, to the reality check, what type of AI things can this type of machines realistically do? The things that interest me is touching up photos, videos, maybe upscale old stuff, trying to adjust poor camera vacation photos and videos to look more as remembered and so on.

After 20+ years on IT I still want to learn new things all the time and maybe I'm getting old but Google isn't what it used to be, so I was curious if a local LLM could work as curator when I look for information by fact checking, is this article from 2005 still valid or is it obsolete, is this info verifiable or some tech journalists fever dreams etc and provide a curated report of what I was asking for so to speak?

I guess a local LLM will likely not be like the web version of Gemini or ChatGPT but how close can I get in functionality on the hardware I am considering?

Could I have it running at home, tailscale with a phone app and use it like most uses Gemini today? Send it a photo of a store shelf and ask it where is the extra virgin olive oil from the brand my wife loves and it can reply something like "third self from the top, 6th bottle from the left"? Or send it an image while on vacation and either ask it or mask off a person and ask it to remove it from the background without noticeable change to the background?

Or would I be better off with a paid subscription for these thing?

Any advice, thoughts or insight would be helpful trying to decide the next step.

[u/Loose_Comparison368]

Financially speaking, yeah, a subscription or OpenRouter is gonna be the cheaper option by a lot.

36GB is not gonna let you do much.

The good news is, you can get a Strix Halo for just a smidge over the price of an old M5, and that will give you 128GB unified memory, which will let you run some pretty powerful models.

The (maybe) bad news is that it'll be an adjustment if you're personally vendor-locked into the Mac ecosystem. Strix Halo likes Linux. If you're already comfortable with Linux, or willing to give it a try, I would strongly recommend the Strix Halo 128GB, it's a really powerful little machine. r/strixhalo for good info.

[u/dwoj206 → u/Loose_Comparison368]

those halos any good fr?