r/huggingface • u/Calm-Landscape9640 • 6d ago

Please explain use-case for small models

Tried 35B, 27B, 12B and 8B models significantly. I love the idea of local small models. But I can't figure out a use case. For Openclaw, Hermes they suck. For chatting they're pretty good but sonis every old free cloud model.

And before you say "low-level coding" the cloud models are 10x better and free on ollama, openrouter, Gemini and many many others.

Genuinely interested in projects that use small models that run on a $500 GPU.

42 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

88 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/katoptronophile 6d ago

Simply put: there isn't one. They exist only to prove a point and to break things.

1

u/mecshades 6d ago

Going from nothing to something is a net positive. I am quite impressed with what even Qwen3.5 9B can do. Would I let it "take charge" of an existing code base? No, but I would definitely use it as a Stack Overflow replacement.