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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to An LLM Running on a PS Vita

Hello all, a couple of moons ago I ported karpathy's llama2.c code to run inference on the TinyStories 260K & 15M checkpoints on the on the PS Vita with the ability to download/delete the models on device. Runs showed that the 260K model ran at ~120 tok/s and at 15M ran at 1.8 tok/s, which probably could be a bit higher if it weren't a single threaded application. Had fun working on it as a weekend project, check it out for yourselves: https://github.com/callbacked/psvita-llm

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    Here's a project I've been working on for the last few months. It's a new (I think) algorithm, that allows to adjust smoothly - and in real time - how many calculations you'd like to do during inference of an LLM model. It seems that it's possible to do just 20-25% of weight multiplications instead of all of them, and still get good inference results. I implemented it to run on M1/M2/M3 GPU. The mmul approximation itself can be pushed to run 2x fast before the quality of output collapses. The inference speed is just a bit faster than Llama.cpp's, because the rest of implementation…

    2024 · asciinema.org · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    The video demo runs a 7b Model on a normal gaming GPU. I think it already works quite well (accounting for the limited hardware power). :)

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hi HN! I'm just sharing a project I've been working on during the LLM Efficiency Challenge - you can now finetune Llama with QLoRA 5x faster than Huggingface's original implementation on your own local GPU. Some highlights: 1. Manual autograd engine - hand derived backprop steps. 2. QLoRA / LoRA 80% faster, 50% less memory. 3. All kernels written in OpenAI's Triton language. 4. 0% loss in accuracy - no approximation methods - all exact. 5. No change of hardware necessary. Supports NVIDIA GPUs since 2018+. CUDA 7.5+. 6. Flash Attention support via Xformers. 7. Supports 4bit and 16bit…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    NobodyWho▲106

    Hey, Hello, we are the team behind NobodyWho; an open-source plugin that embeds large language models functionality inside Unity and Godot games - completely locally and offline. We try to make it as easy and user friendly as possible to use our plugin, so feel free to create an issue on our GitHub if you have any inconveniences - and we will try to improve it! So why might this interest you: - Written in Rust with llama.cpp bindings and optional GPU back-ends (Vulkan / Metal) for fast inference. - Drop-in nodes / components: add a model asset and a chat or embedding node and get a…

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    I discovered that in LLM inference, keys and values in the KV cache have very different quantization sensitivities. Keys need higher precision than values to maintain quality. I patched llama.cpp to enable different bit-widths for keys vs. values on Apple Silicon. The results are surprising: - K8V4 (8-bit keys, 4-bit values): 59% memory reduction with only 0.86% perplexity loss - K4V8 (4-bit keys, 8-bit values): 59% memory reduction but 6.06% perplexity loss - The configurations use the same number of bits, but K8V4 is 7× better for quality This means you can run LLMs with 2-3× longer…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Build your own high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA - a smaller version of vLLM - jmaczan/tiny-vllm

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    We wrote our inference engine on Rust, it is faster than llama cpp in all of the use cases. Your feedback is very welcomed. Written from scratch with idea that you can add support of any kernel and platform.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    The Emotion Engine has 32 MB of RAM total, so the trick is streaming weights from CD-ROM one matrix at a time during the forward pass — only activations, KV cache and embeddings live in RAM. This means models bigger than the RAM can still run, they just read more from disc. Had to build a custom quantized format (PSNT), hack endianness, write a tokenizer pipeline, and most of the PS2 SDK from scratch (releasing that separately). The model itself is also custom — a 10M param Llama-style architecture I trained specifically for this. And it works. On real hardware.

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    A simple calculator that estimates how many concurrent requests your GPU can handle for a given LLM, with shareable results.

    2025 · selfhostllm.org · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hi HN, I spent my easter weekend stuck in the house with COVID and I decided to play with llama.cpp [1] and fauxpilot [2] to see if I could get LLM code assist working on pure CPU. As a proof of concept I'd say I've proven that it's possible. However there's still a lot to do. The auto complete is quite slow at the moment. PRs welcome. [1] https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp [2] https://github.com/fauxpilot/fauxpilot

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Democratisation of local AI is key. I've been working on pushing the limits of commercial hardware, squeezing any extra bit possible. My Scientific Agentic AI hareness helped me to reallocate every single bit of it. I rewrote the Kernel, I went down the CUDA rabbit hole until I have been able to explain any bit and any ms of computational power involved in the process pushing the Qwen 30B-A3B from 8 tok7s to 19 tok/s with llama.cpp up to 22.2 tok/s with my project and 109 tok/s on not novel content and speeding up the prefill by 5-9X

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi there, looking for feedback on my new project "Featherless.AI" The idea is to allow users to run all the models on hugging face instantly. Via the OpenAI API compatible endpoint. Why? Because its a real chore to download models and spin up GPUs, especially if you want to test multiple models. Not to mention GPUs cost multiple dollars an hour to rent. And if we want more people to use open source AI, we got to make it easier for them to try and play with all of them. So what if instead of spinning up dedicated GPUs per model (which is what every provider is doing) We can startup a LLM…

    2024 · featherless.ai · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    G'day, HN! I'm one of the maintainers of `llm`. I've been working alongside a trusty group of contributors to bring this project to life, and we're now at a point where we're ready to share it with the world. Large language models (LLMs) are taking the computing world by storm due to their emergent abilities that allow them to perform a wide variety of tasks, including translation, summarization, code generation, and even some degree of reasoning. However, the ecosystem around LLMs is still in its infancy, and it can be difficult to get started with these models. `llm` is a one-stop shop for…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    AnyLLM▲20

    10+ LLMs at 10x speed. Think we're kidding. Test it now!

    2025 · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    I've built an airgapped Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for question-answering on documents, running entirely offline with local inference. Using Llama 3, Mistral, and Gemini, this setup allows secure, private NLP on your own machine. Perfect for researchers, data scientists, and developers who need to process sensitive data without cloud dependencies. Built with Llama C++, LangChain, and Streamlit, it supports quantized models and provides a sleek UI for document processing. Check it out, contribute, or suggest new features!

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    I made this after seeing someone posit the idea online yesterday over lunch then spent some time refining it. So far it's pretty impressive IMO! Right now I am running Qwen3-30B-A3B on my 24gb unified memory m4 MacBook Pro at 50 tok/sec and this should definitely not be working for such a large model on my middling hardware. Things are detailed in the README to get up and running and DESIGN.md has details on all the choices and such made along the way.

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    I thought it'd be interesting to use Linux PSI (Pressure Stall Information) for an LLM runtime to trim the KV cache. This is mainly useful imo for edge devices like the Jetson Orin super nano kit which have unified memory. I haven't benched much, but plan to do so more over time and see if I can make a real use of it as I run local LLMs. Let me know if it makes sense :P (I of course vibed this idea)

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Warning: Inference takes ages. Pics & Media: https://x.com/VulcanIgnis/status/1893420241310335329

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hey HN, My team is open-sourcing the inference stack and fined-tuned models we use to create LLM-powered NPCs: https://github.com/GigaxGames/gigax The generative agents paper [1] pioneered the idea of prompting LLMs to create autonomous NPCs. But existing implementations require multiple calls to an LLM to make the agent plan its day, chat with people, and interact with its environment [2]. Our approach allows NPCs to be stepped at runtime with a single pass on consumer-grade hardware, with reasonable latency. To achieve this, we've fine-tuned open-source LLMs [3] to…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Built a simple web app that tells you which open-source LLMs will work on your hardware. It auto-detects your specs, shows compatible models from Hugging Face, gives realistic performance estimates (tokens/sec), and recommends quantization settings. You can also manually input specs to see "what if I upgraded my RAM?" Made this after wasting time downloading giant models only to find they crawled on my hardware. Hope it saves you some frustration!

    2025 · caniusellm.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21SY

    Hey HN, If you tried running open-source models like Llama 3.1 70B or 405B, you might have noticed that it gets very expensive. The reason looks obvious enough that you might have stopped even before trying it! - GPUs are very expensive to buy or rent - Running the most performing LLMs need 4, 8 or even 16 top of the line Nvidia GPUs - And that won’t get you anywhere near the level of VRAM needed to batch enough to get a decent throughput and efficiency Some have even questioned if open-source LLM providers are not doing some shenanigans to provide the prices they offer. VC funded…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    With the latest launch from Google I've added support for Gemma 3 270M, the speed for local LLM to TTS token time is incredible! This is an heavy obvious work in progress - any contributions or tips would be welcome. The idea is to have a fast moving edge model playground, and maybe have some utility (like the e reader) on the side.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23RL

    A week of benchmarks on a Xeon CPU box. TurboQuant ≠ 8× faster, speculative decoding ≠ universal win, ik_llama.cpp breaks parallel calls. Gemma-4-E4B-it on stock llama.cpp wins. Eleven cells, full source, MIT.

    Jun 2026 · deemwar-products.github.io · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    hey hn, I built an open-source Perplexity clone that can run local LLMs and cloud LLMs. It's fully self-hostable through Docker and uses ollama to support local LLMs. The demo video in the repository shows me running it locally with llama3 on my M1 Macbook Pro. I'm open to any suggestions or feedback, thanks!

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

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