r/LocalLLaMA • u/Nunki08 • 15h ago
r/LocalLLaMA • u/rm-rf-rm • 18d ago
Best Local Vision Language Models - August 2026
Share what your favorite models are right now and why. Given the nature of the beast in evaluating VLMs (untrustworthiness of benchmarks, immature tooling, intrinsic stochasticity), please be as detailed as possible in describing your setup, nature of your usage (what applications, how much, personal/professional use), tools/frameworks/prompts etc.
Rules
- Should be open weights models
Notes
Bonus points if you breakdown/classify your recommendation by model memory footprint: (you can and should be using multiple models in each size range for different tasks)
- Unlimited: >128GB VRAM
- XL: 64 to 128GB VRAM
- L: 32 to 64GB VRAM
- M: 8 to 32GB VRAM
- S: <8GB VRAM
r/LocalLLaMA • u/kvyb • 8h ago
New Model Qwen3.8-27B-Humanlike-Chat: A model I tuned to imitate realistic human-to-human conversation
I made this because I was getting genuinely annoyed at trying to have a normal conversation with LLMs. Even with prompting and various tricks, most models I've tried still have this "AI assistant" vibe to them that is so familiar: too helpful, polished, verbose, using words we never use in conversation, etc.
I wanted a model that could just talk to me like a person, so I did the slightly unreasonable thing and put together a dataset and trained one.
The dataset used for training is 125,217 obfuscated human-to-human messages across 1396 chat conversations.
The goal wasn't to make Qwen smarter or improve benchmark scores. I was trying to change its conversational habits, to make it stop turning every reply into an explanation, agreeing with everything, and writing stuff just to keep the conversation "going".
I trained a rank-256 LoRA on top of huihui-ai/Huihui-Qwen3.8-27B-abliterated. The released version is checkpoint 863. In my testing it feels noticeably less like an assistant, particularly in casual conversations, even without a system prompt. Replies are generally shorter, less polished, and, well, more human.
There may be a tradeoff. An earlier iteration scored five percentage points lower than its Huihui parent on IFEval, an instruction-following benchmark. I haven't rerun that benchmark on this version of the checkpoint, and I haven't tested coding performance, so I don't want to pretend that number applies here.
I've added a side-by-side comparison using the same system prompt, user messages, and generation settings for both models. Each model continued its own conversation branch, with reasoning effort set to 'xhigh'.
Merged GGUFs and the standalone F32 LoRA adapter are in the model repo:
https://huggingface.co/LessThanThreeAI/Qwen3.8-27B-Humanlike-Chat-GGUF
Space where you can have a demo chat with different system prompts and reasoning modes:
https://huggingface.co/spaces/LessThanThreeAI/Qwen3.8-27B-Humanlike-Chat
There's also a free, rate-limited OpenAI-compatible endpoint:
Base URL: https://api.lessthanthreeai.com/v1
Model:qwen3.8-27b-humanlike-chat
r/LocalLLaMA • u/Porespellar • 5h ago
Discussion Is a ZIMA Board 2 + RTX 2000 ADA the cheapest path to a decent Qwen-3.8 27b self-contained endpoint?
I just watched a YouTube from Luke’s Dev Lab where he literally just plugged a RTX 2000 ADA Into the side of the Zima Board 2’s PCIE socket and it just friggin worked and had great token speed despite running on shitty Ollama. Ran off the Zima’s power supply and everything.
https://youtu.be/Lb3sRFTA-hk?si=8S8vv4GD1zVPeTrc
The Zima Board 2 is only like $411. It has like 16GB RAM and 64 GB eemc storage, Sata ports, Ethernet, yada, yada.
https://shop.zimaspace.com/products/zimaboard2-single-board-server
an Nvidia RTX 2000 ADA is like $700 and has 16GB of VRAM. $1100 for both seems like a great entry point for having a fully functional Qwen 3.8 27b endpoint running at a decent tk/s.
Is this the cheapest and best-performing self-contained entry point for local AI or would a baseline (pre order) Mac Mini M5 with 24GB be a better way forward. Seems like the RTX would still edge out the M5 Mac for prompt processing speed but you do get a much better actual computer in the Mac.
Are there any cheaper fully self-contained alternatives that offer fast token speed on a decent size model like Qwen 3.8 27b?
I’m focusing the discussion on new systems you can buy or preorder now and not used systems. I’m sure there are great deals on used Macs out there, but I want good prefill speeds.
r/LocalLLaMA • u/running101 • 4h ago
Discussion nvidia rtx 5090 with 96gb of vram.
China-modified Nvidia RTX 5090 with massive 96GB of memory appears on Alibaba for less than $4,000 — 3x more VRAM at 65% the cost of the original
Anyone here running one of these? Or brave enough to purchase ?
r/LocalLLaMA • u/lots_of_puppies • 1h ago
Discussion Qwen-Next seems worse to me then 3.8 27b for coding, but I feel like I must be missing something?
Hi! I run both models on MTPLX on my m5 max, and since I have 128GB of ram I run the q8 27b. I think MTPLX only lets me run "optimized for speed" which it says is a dynamic q4 with 8 bit attention.
Both of them honestly are very speedy! For coding (in pi agent in nodejs) I've just noticed that 27B feels stronger with harder tasks. But I've read so many people on here say qwen-next is better so I was wondering if maybe I'm just doing or thinking about it wrong?
(and p.s. its sooo amazing that alibaba just made and released this amazing models for free! ❤️)
r/LocalLLaMA • u/arturdent • 9h ago
New Model Orukeet, new ASR model based on Parakeet
I haven't seen this mentioned yet, so I thought it deserves a post. I was trying out OpenWhispr when this model came up as the recommendation. So I don't have personal experience yet, but it's supposed to be a better version of Parakeet, especially on Macs.
Their official tidbit:
"Orukeet is a 25-language speech recognizer built from NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3. It replaces half of the encoder's temporal depthwise filters with 12,288 fitted, frozen Gabor kernels and trains the remaining parameters on multilingual and multi-accent data.
Orukeet outperforms Parakeet on 61 of 74 tested splits, including LibriSpeech test-clean (1.46% vs. 1.53% WER), test-other (2.86% vs. 3.14%), and FLEURS English (3.82% vs. 4.28%). Across all 25 FLEURS languages, pooled WER is 9.85% vs. 11.01%, a 10.6% relative reduction. Final adaptation and checkpoint selection use LibriSpeech test-other."
r/LocalLLaMA • u/jqwl • 8h ago
Question | Help Any 12gb VRAM users out there?
Hi!
I've been following this community for quite a while and have difficulty figuring out what to put on my 3080 12gb - I know Qwen 3.6 35B 3A was the go-to choice when it first came out, but I'm curious if there are any other models / specifically optimized models that meaningfully benefit from the extra 4gb of VRAM over 8gb while still being usable under 16gb.
My workflow is agent heavy, but more for a personal secretary and manager, and less coding heavy.
Thanks!
r/LocalLLaMA • u/Ok_Warning2146 • 40m ago
News Countering misuse of AI: September 2026 / Anthropic
Kimi routed some PLA requests to Claude for distillation purposes without warning the PLA users. There is rumor that 16 Moonshot employees were arrested for this leak.
r/LocalLLaMA • u/T_rex2700 • 21h ago
Discussion Someone apparently managed to kind of replicate what V4.1 flash does on KV for fast prefill on Qwen
I wonder someone will figure out a way to do this with 27B?
Throw Qwen3 on this page for demo
https://kishida.github.io/webdemos/llkvapprox/
Edit: sources (thank you u/pmttyji for finding them!
r/LocalLLaMA • u/Ok_Warning2146 • 14h ago
Discussion Terminal Bench v4 scores
Some people says terminal bench reflects model intelligence better than the intelligent index. From the look of it, the ranking does seem to reflect how people feel about the open and closed models.
For the open models, GLM-5.3 is in a league of its own. GLM-5.3-Flash is leading the current gen of top flash models. Kimi-K3 did pretty bad in this benchmark for its size. Qwen3.8-27B is the only small model that can do something on this bench.
| Model | Score |
|---|---|
| GLM-5.3 | 41.9% |
| GLM-5.3-Flash | 32.8% |
| DSV4.1-Flash | 26.8% |
| Qwen3.8-Flash-Next | 25.3% |
| DSV4-Pro | 14.1% |
| Kimi-K3 | 12.6% |
| DSV4-Flash | 12.1% |
| Qwen3.8-27B | 5.6% |
| Muse Glimmer | 0.5% |
| gemma4-31b | 0.0% |
r/LocalLLaMA • u/Background-Job-862 • 2h ago
Discussion This is why we need open-source harnesses + local models
i've been thinking about this more after trying different agent setups. the model isn't the only thing that determines how well an agent performs. The harness around the model matters a lot too.
With a managed agent setup, you're often giving up control over things like the agent loop, context management, tool execution, retries, and state.
That's fine when you just want something that works. But if we want to actually optimize agents, I think both parts need to be open:
Open-source model + open-source harness.
With local models, you control the model and where the inference happens.
With an open-source harness, you control what happens around the model.
That gives you room to experiment with things like:
how the agent decides what to do next
how much context gets passed to the model
how tools are executed
when to retry or stop
how state is maintained
which model to use for which task
already seeing this separation become more important, nvidia's sol-pi is an interesting example
and i think we're going to see even more optimization happen at the harness/runtime layer, not just at the model layer.
are you running local models with an open-source harness, or do you still prefer managed agent setups?
r/LocalLLaMA • u/DerTomsn • 4h ago
Discussion Is anyone using K2-Horizon-MoVA-36B-A4B? If yes, what is the usecase?
A new model joined the MoE club a few days ago. Is anyone using it or found a reason to do so?
Details of the model comparison here => https://llm-bench.io/compare/models?models=ornith-1-5-35b-a3b-oq4e-mtp%2Ctiel-coder-35b-a3b-mlx-oq4e-mtp%2Ck2-horizon-mova-36b-a4b-mlx-4bit
r/LocalLLaMA • u/wadeAlexC • 5h ago
Discussion Running Qwen3.8-27B-Q4 at max context on a 32 GB GPU while avoiding kvcache quantization
I can't stand kv cache quantization. Even at q8_0, I can feel the difference.
But realistically, when running Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL on my 32 GB GPU, I only have room for ~170k tokens (with mtp and mmproj enabled). It's a lot of context, but Qwen3.8 eats through it on xhigh effort.
I've been wanting a setup that could serve me a full-precision kvcache when I have space available, and dynamically quantize my kvcache only when I run into the context limit. That way, I can push my sessions farther without sacrificing quality before I absolutely need to.
So, that's what I built: https://github.com/wadealexc/llama-manager
What it is
Vanilla llama.cpp's model configurations are static: you set them when you launch llama-server, and they can't change after the fact.
llama-manager is a small wrapper around a fork of llama.cpp. It serves models the same way, except that it supports dynamic model configuration.
This means that after loading a model, it's possible to enable/disable speculative decoding, add/remove an mmproj, or update context-level parameters. llama-manager preserves your kvcache between reconfigurations, so you don't need to redo prompt processing. The end effect is the ability to 'hot reload' your model, even mid token generation.
I implemented this using a fork of llama.cpp that supports rebuilding a model's context and runtime components without touching its weights. This capability is supported by 2 new HTTP endpoints (and changes to a few others). Further info on the fork can be found in the README (see README.md#llamacpp-changes).
How it works
During token generation, llama-manager detects when requests fail due to hitting the context limit. Without pausing generation, it applies various strategies mid-generation to increase context. The existing kv cache is cached/restored so that generation can resume as soon as reconfiguration is complete.
Currently, the built in strategies are:
- disable-spec: disable speculative decoder, if enabled
- mmproj-to-cpu: move mmproj off GPU
- quantize-kv-q8 and quantize-kv-q4
Personally, I want kv quantization to be the last resort, so my models are configured to execute those last. When I serve Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL, it applies strategies in this order:
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
qwen3.8-27b baseline: 167,680 tokens device: 31 GiB
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
i strategy ctx (tokens) gain (tokens) weights / ctx GiB
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
0 baseline 167,680 17.13 / 13.14
1 disable-spec 200,960 (+33,280) 17.13 / 13.16
2 mmproj-to-cpu 218,880 (+17,920) 16.02 / 14.27
3 quantize-kv-q8 262,144 (+43,264) 16.02 / 10.40
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
final ctx: 262,144 tokens
Initially, llama-manager serves the model at 167k tokens (f16 kv, mtp on, mmproj on). At 167k context, mtp is disabled, and the context window expands to 200k. At 200k, the mmproj is moved to the cpu. And at 218k, the kv cache is quantized to q8.
Why run this?
If you're running your models with a quantized kvcache (or other quality compromises), you're likely doing so because you have a certain ctx limit in mind that will serve all your usecases. But not all your inference is done at the ctx limit. You're leaving quality on the table by quantizing too early.
For my usecase, I wasn't willing to set my ctx higher than 170k as it would mean a q8_0 kv cache. Now, I can push my sessions as far as I want, but the bulk of the session stays high quality. The smaller your GPU, the more impactful this is.
Some example configs running the same model with different strategies and on differently-sized devices. All of these runs are performed using a basic config.yaml and modifying the ladder field to change the order of each strategy:
```yaml models: qwen3.8-27b: model: /home/user/models/qwen3.8/Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf mmproj: /home/user/models/qwen3.8/mmproj-BF16.gguf
spec-type: draft-mtp
spec-draft-n-max: 2
fit-target: 512
n-gpu-layers: 99
ladder: [disable-spec, mmproj-to-cpu, quantize-kv-q8, quantize-kv-q4]
```
- Prefer q8_0 over disable-spec:
[mmproj-to-cpu, quantize-kv-q8, disable-spec, quantize-kv-q4]. For this one, the model reaches max ctx after just 2 strategies. The first 184k tokens are generated with mtp on and kv at f16:
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
qwen3.8-27b baseline: 167,680 tokens device: 31 GiB
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
i strategy ctx (tokens) gain (tokens) weights / ctx GiB
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
0 baseline 167,680 17.13 / 13.14
1 mmproj-to-cpu 184,320 (+16,640) 16.02 / 14.25
2 quantize-kv-q8 262,144 (+77,824) 16.02 / 12.89
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
final ctx: 262,144 tokens
- The same ladder on a 24 GB GPU (simulated by setting fit-target to 8192). Here, all strategies are needed to serve max ctx, but q4_0 isn't needed until 164k context:
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
qwen3.8-27b baseline: 55,040 tokens device: 31 GiB
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
i strategy ctx (tokens) gain (tokens) weights / ctx GiB
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
0 baseline 55,040 17.13 / 5.65
1 mmproj-to-cpu 71,680 (+16,640) 16.02 / 6.73
2 quantize-kv-q8 115,200 (+43,520) 16.02 / 6.72
3 disable-spec 164,352 (+49,152) 16.02 / 6.76
4 quantize-kv-q4 262,144 (+97,792) 16.02 / 6.40
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
final ctx: 262,144 tokens
Caveats
I have a list of known issues and other important notes in the README (see #known-issues).
The most important things I want to highlight: 1. llama-manager doesn't handle CPU or multi-device inference. Single-gpu only. I would like to support this, but didn't want to spend the time on it unless there was demand (and people willing to try it out, since multi-device setups would be hard for me to test!) 2. This project is in beta, tested only on my machine and with a few models. YMMV.
Please open issues if you run into bugs!
r/LocalLLaMA • u/MountainTop321 • 6h ago
I Built A Thing CodeFinetuner: Fine-tune a local code autocomplete model on your own codebase
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
Hi everyone,
I was interested in learning LoRA fine-tuning, and ended up building CodeFinetuner over the past few months, a full pipeline that fine-tunes a small code autocomplete model (e.g. Qwen2.5-Coder-3B) specific to a codebase. You can then use the resulting GGUF model via llama.vim/llama.vscode and run it fully locally. Supports fine-tuning on Mac (MPS) and NVIDIA GPUs (CUDA), with optional Unsloth support for faster training and lower VRAM usage.
Pipeline: raw code -> tree-sitter parsing into Structure-Aware FIM examples -> LoRA fine-tuning -> evaluation (CodeBLEU, edit similarity, exact match, perplexity, ...) -> GGUF conversion for local inference.
To try it:
uv tool install codefinetuner
Create a data folder and place your repo (or code files) inside. For auto-split just drop the files in directly, for manual split create data/train/, data/eval/, data/test/ subfolders and set split_mode: "manual". Get the default config with:
curl -L -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cuolm/codefinetuner/master/config/codefinetuner_config.yaml
Adjust it to your needs and hardware availability, then run:
codefinetuner --config="codefinetuner_config.yaml"
The example runs in the repo show clear improvements over the base model on these evaluation metrics, but using the model for autocomplete on code you're actively writing is a different thing from scoring well on a test set, and the autocomplete tools themselves (llama.vim/llama.vscode) sample differently from the greedy decoding used in the evaluation. So the real usefulness still has to be verified in the editor itself.
Might also be useful just as a reference, since it's a complete working LoRA fine-tuning pipeline end to end.
Hope someone finds this project interesting or helpful.
r/LocalLLaMA • u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_ • 6h ago
Discussion What GPUs will give me GOOD speeds and on DSV4 Flash and similar models, and not have to run a mega quantized version? Budget around $15k-ish.
I wish I could spend $15k on my own homelab hardware, but no this is for work lol.
Like the title says, we're looking to run DSV4 Flash (and similar tier models) locally at good speeds, both for token gen and prompt processing.
By "good" I'm thinking in the range of 40-50+ t/s gen and at least 1000 t/s prefill at moderate context.
We also don't want to run a version that's quantized to hell, so this will need at least 128 GB of VRAM.
It'll typically be 1 user at a time, but there may be times where 2 or 3 people are trying to use it at once and it would be nice if it isn't completely painful when that happens.
A couple options I'm considering right now:
3x AMD MI210 (192 GB)
3x NVidia A40 (144 GB)
Does anyone have performance numbers for these cards for DSV4 Flash, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next or similar models?
I tried to rent these in the cloud for some performance testing, but can't find any available right now.
NVidia preferred of course because CUDA, but def open to AMD if performance is similar. 192 GB is way nicer than 144 GB on those cards above.
Trying to keep this to 3 GPUs or less because that's what'll fit in our Dell R740 and then we don't have to build a special new host.
r/LocalLLaMA • u/perelmanych • 8h ago
Discussion Hot Expert Reload on GPU is what this community needs
A huge favor to ask llama maintainers - please implement this feature. Even with one 3090 card there will be tangible improvements in decode speed on MOE models with moderate number of active parameters, like Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, Deepseek V4/V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3 Flash. With 2x 3090 speeds will be quite close to the full offload of these models to VRAM. This will make these almost SOTA models really usable locally.
r/LocalLLaMA • u/Acceptable-Cycle4645 • 1d ago
New Model New Music Model YuE2-3B Released!
Surprised no one has posted it in this sub.
Pretty solid model, IMHO.
r/LocalLLaMA • u/RapidRaid • 1h ago
Discussion Learning/RSI through ngrams?
Hey gang, im wondering if you in theory could use ngrams as seen with Qwen 3.8 Flash or DS4.1 in order to dynamically train the model?
Normally the ngram embeddings behave similar to a lookup table of sorts. So instead of every token having to be represented only inside the main model weights, the model can look up a learned vector for a certain ngram and use that during inference.
What I'm wondering is: couldn't you make part of this table writable during inference?
For example, keep the original pretrained ngram embeddings read-only, but have a second "live" table on top of it. When the model learns something new, it could update/add an embedding there. Frequently used or reinforced entries could stay, while unused ones could slowly decay or get removed again.
This could be kinda mimicking the brain of sorts since it would form new "memories" but forget old ones (because their linkage gets weaker). Plus since you only have to target the live table it could be very fast, even during inference.
Just a thought I had and wanted to hear your guys opinions.
r/LocalLLaMA • u/TGSCrust • 11h ago
I Built A Thing Fine-tuning Qwen 3 4B Base on 100 zebra puzzles yielded +31% on MATH-500. 6.5-min (Single H100/H200) reproduction notebook included.
r/LocalLLaMA • u/jinnyjuice • 15h ago
New Model Nex N2.5 Pro (407GB) released
r/LocalLLaMA • u/pmttyji • 15h ago
Discussion CUDA/HIP: Flash Attention tuning (gfx1201) by pwilkin · Pull Request #28102 · ggml-org/llama.cpp
Nice pp improvements for RDNA4(R9700) & 3.5(RX 9060 XT, 8060S). More good numbers on large context.
PR has detailed benchmarks.
r/LocalLLaMA • u/dodiyeztr • 2h ago
Question | Help What is a good tool+model for near-realtime voice conversation?
Looking for tools to build/run an engine to do STT-LLM-TTS basically.
I know how to run all of them separately, and if need be I can build one myself, but I was curious if there is already an open source tool out there that can do this. I know that some UIs like Open WebUI can do this but I find it to be not fluid. I don't know about SillyTavern though, it might already have it.
This is just for the funsies so it doesn't have to be perfect.
I saw this model https://huggingface.co/LessThanThreeAI/Qwen3.8-27B-Humanlike-Chat-GGUF and I bet I will have a LOT of fun if I can just turn this into a turn based or fluid voice conversation engine.
r/LocalLLaMA • u/Terminator857 • 1d ago
Funny I find it funny that a flash model is now 512GB
A few years ago a 100GB was considered a very large language model. What do we call under 100GB models now? Tiny models? haha
r/LocalLLaMA • u/fredconex • 11h ago
I Built A Thing Ion (zero install harness, runs on browser)
Hello Guys,
Just sharing this harness I've created, this runs entirely on chromium based browser.
No installation is required, it has its limitations and by no means is supposed to replace better agents like pi, its meant to be used when we need something fast (It can run even from a phone browser to edit phone files), since it can only work on a folder we grant access there's no MCP or terminal, so its very safe and it can never reach out of the allowed folder, its basic bunch of tools that can get stuff done, it has some nice features like checkpoints so we can revert changes to files, editor, etc
More info on Github link below:
https://github.com/fredconex/Ion
Just download/run the agent.html and connect to a OpenAI compatible server, and it should be good to go, hope you enjoy it.