Nvidia hardware is cheap as chips right now. If you got 2x 3060 12gb cards (or a 24gb 4090), you'd have 24gb of CUDA-accelerated VRAM to play with for inference and finetuning. It should be plenty to fit the smaller SOTA models like GLM-4.5 Air, Qwen3 30b A3B, and Llama Scout, and definitely enough to start layering the giant 100b+ parameter options.
In my opinion? Qwen3 does live up to the benchmarks, it leaves Sonnet 4 in the dust quality-wise if you can get a fast enough tok/s to use it. I haven't tried GLM or Llama Scout yet, nor do I have a particularly big frame of reference for the quality of Opus 4.
You might be able to try out Qwen3 via API to see if it suits your needs. Their 30b MOE is really impressive, and the 480b one can only be better (presumably).
> What would you recommend?
Invest in a local inference server and run Qwen3. At this point it will still cost less than two pro accounts.
What hardware do you suggest? :)
Iunno, whatever you can afford?
Nvidia hardware is cheap as chips right now. If you got 2x 3060 12gb cards (or a 24gb 4090), you'd have 24gb of CUDA-accelerated VRAM to play with for inference and finetuning. It should be plenty to fit the smaller SOTA models like GLM-4.5 Air, Qwen3 30b A3B, and Llama Scout, and definitely enough to start layering the giant 100b+ parameter options.
That's what I'd get, at least.
> GLM-4.5 Air, Qwen3 30b A3B, and Llama Scout
Are they good enough compared to Sonnet 4?
I’ve also used Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash, and they’re worse. But they’re much bigger, not just 30B.
In my opinion? Qwen3 does live up to the benchmarks, it leaves Sonnet 4 in the dust quality-wise if you can get a fast enough tok/s to use it. I haven't tried GLM or Llama Scout yet, nor do I have a particularly big frame of reference for the quality of Opus 4.
You might be able to try out Qwen3 via API to see if it suits your needs. Their 30b MOE is really impressive, and the 480b one can only be better (presumably).