Well, I reinstalled LM Studio today after some ~10 months since I last used it, just to test Gemma 4. On my PC with 32GB RAM and 4070 Ti (12GB VRAM), it (Gemma 4 26B A4B Q4_K_M) loads and runs reasonably fast, with no manual parameter or configuration tuning - just out of the box, on fresh install - and delivers results usable results on the level I remember expecting from SOTA cloud models 12-16 months ago. And handles image input, too. I'm quite impressed with it, TBH. It's something I can finally see myself using, and yay, it even leaves some RAM and VRAM left for doing other stuff.
Look for the current crop of local Mixture of Experts models, where it seems like they've made inroads on the O(n^2) context attention cost problem. Several folks have mentioned Qwen, but there's many more of that ilk. Several of them actually score really high on benchmarks. But when I mess with one of them locally by hand myself, (I have a 3090), it feels a bit like last year's Sonnet. They don't quite make the leaps of understanding you get from Opus.
You can run SOTA local MoE models very slowly by streaming the weights in from a fast PCIe 5 SSD. Kimi 2.5 (generally considered in the ballpark of current sonnet, not opus of course) has been measured as 2 tok/s on Apple M5 hardware, which is the best-case performance unless you have niche HEDT hardware with lots of PCIe lanes to attach storage to and figure out how to use that amount of parallel transfer throughput.
A ~$5000 USD Macbook can run open source models that are competitive with GPT 3.5 or Sonnet 3. So on nice consumer hardware you can have the original groundbreaking ChatGPT experience that runs locally.
Last I heard, claude was the model powering maven when it bombed that school. Most aren't up-to date on that because anthropic launders their culpability through palanntir. Anthropic is better at optics not ethics.
No matter what you say, you know yourself the truth that the DoW wanted to go over the red lines of anthropic and they said no, while openai said yes. This is as clear as day to everyone and you are just lying yourself to believe something else.
This kind of bureaucracy sounds like the stuff my teachers criticised communism and socialism for in school. Isn't our 'capitalist' system supposed to thwart this?
Is qwen 3.5 any good for chatting? I use chatgpt for 'light therapy' (basically sounding out confusing social situations my friends don't want to walk me through) and it's honestly been amazing. But I would rather not give all that to openai.
>The bar for human juniors is now way higher than it used to be.
What do you think that is now? How does someone signal being 'past the bar'? If I hand wrote a toy gaussian splat renderer is that better than someone who used AI to implement a well optimized one with lots of features in vulkan?
'past the bar' means you have to be smarter than AI, simple as that. You need to be able to tell when it delivers good work, and when not. If you are not smarter than AI, you will not be able to tell the difference. And then what is your added value?
> think the folks burning thousands of dollars of credits are unable to describe what they want.
Basically, yes. I bought 'business tier' and I know about webdev but I'm somewhere between intern and junior, so I do a lot of discussing. One session is "I want [functionality and constraints], ask me relevant major design questions" then implementation, then me investigating and asking for fixes.
As an artist, this isn't incredible. Arranging lights/darks to copy a photo is high-school tier. Money for food + shelter + materials and I could do this in a month, as with anyone who can copy a black and white photo.
I'm serious. The world is rife with things the "don't seem like a big deal" only in retrospect, when people downplay innovations as "no big deal/anyone can do that" when something comes on the scene that a lot of people connect with.
Heck, I feel like your response is the art equivalent of this top comment on the original Dropbox Show HN submission by Drew Houston:
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
> Well then, why didn't you come up with it first?
This is never a good question. It doesn't take much imagination to substitute X in "Why didn't you come up with X first?" with something of no value. Obviously, if someone finds something to be of no value, then they would not have come up with it, would they. Or at least they would not have pursued it.
Rather, one must give reasons for believing something has value. (And I seriously doubt this is "new", though novelty is itself irrelevant. Valueless things can be "novel", too.)
IMO, this glass technique is maybe interesting, but it is also sort of gimmicky, at least as presented.
He's replying to a post that says it's "new, unexpected, and incredible" and he specifically only addresses whether it's incredible. I think, especially in the spirit of "assume the strongest interpretation", you can probably assume that an artist is well aware of the value of novelty and is quite specifically not disputing it.
Obligatory reminder that the Dropbox thread ends with "I only hope that I was able to give you a sneak preview of some of the potential criticisms you may receive. Best of luck to you!" The comment didn't dunk on Dropbox as an idea, but pointed out that they would need to highlight their moat wrt copycat competitors in order to convince sceptical investors.
The artist in question is presumably not raising VC money, so concerns about long-term viability of the niche if other artists start imitating the style probably don't apply. (Maybe it's even the reverse situation, where increased production of cracked-glass art raises the profile of the trailblazer and increases the demand for "originals.")
Calling observational realism high school tier while working in 3D (as per your profile) is hilarious given your medium automates the very thing you are belittling and is literally taught these days at elementary school!
Any serious artist would respect technical competency. I guess that says a lot about your credentials “as an artist”.
I'm sorry is there anything even close to sonnet, much less opus, that can be run on a 4080? Or 64gb of ram, even slowly?
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