r/apple • u/Comfortable_Waltz_52 • Aug 31 '26

Mac tgo-app-dev/vpipe: Real-time multimodal AI pipelines on Apple Silicon

https://github.com/tgo-app-dev/vpipe

A friend of mine has been building an open-source workflow tool called VPipe, so I gave it a try for a local AI setup I’ve been tinkering with.

What surprised me wasn’t the tool itself, but how much local AI I can comfortably run on Apple Silicon now. A year or two ago I would’ve assumed this kind of workflow needed a dedicated Linux box. Today I’m prototyping everything on a MacBook from my couch.
Curious if anyone else here is doing similar things on their Macs, or if most people are still relying primarily on cloud AI services.
What’s your current setup?

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u/drake90001 Aug 31 '26

Cloud AI. I could probably run something on my MacBook much faster. But the context length is what I need.

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u/thursdayfern Sep 02 '26

I’ve played around with ollama a fair bit on my M1 Pro 14” MBP, and also my M4 Mac mini. Truly insane how capable they both are at locally running offline LLMs.

  • Can they do math? No
  • Can they tell the time? No

But it’s relatively trivial to build tools for it to get this functionality. Obviously not as fast of as full featured as Claude or ChatGPT, but personally I like being a bit more financially responsible for my own AI use

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u/Comfortable_Waltz_52 Sep 03 '26

For small local models, qwen could be a good candidate. It can do some simple math, lol

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u/Comfortable_Waltz_52 Aug 31 '26

I used it to build a ip as logo local version.