AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I made a Gemma 4 Mac app that names screenshots with local AI
I made my first macOS utility app that ships with a bundled Gemma 4 model, specifically the Gemma E4B one. It made my app DMG have 5.3 GB in size, but I think it is a small size for the power that this free local model can provide. It runs fine on CPU, but can also run on Apple Silicon GPU, although I did not notice any performance improvements with GPU (tested on a M5 chip). I think these local lightweight and multimodal models will open multiple possibilities for new software tools where privacy is essential.
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.
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Hi HN, I built a specialized inference engine for running 4-bit Gemma 4 26B-A4B-IT on any M-series Mac using about 2 GB of RAM. It is called TurboFieldfare and is written in Swift and Metal. I have always adored on-device AI. It feels like magic that you can run a powerful NN on your Mac or iPhone. So I wanted to push the limits a bit and run a model whose weights don’t fit in memory. The model’s 4-bit quantized weights occupy roughly 14 GB, which makes running it with conventional inference tools almost impossible on an 8 GB or even 16 GB Mac once the OS, applications, and KV cache are…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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About six months ago, I started working on a project to fine-tune Whisper locally on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio with a limited compute budget. I got into it. The problem I had at the time was I had 15,000 hours of audio data in Google Cloud Storage, and there was no way I could fit all the audio onto my local machine, so I built a system to stream data from my GCS to my machine during training. Gemma 3n came out, so I added that. Kinda went nuts, tbh. Then I put it on the shelf. When Gemma 4 came out a few days ago, I dusted it off, cleaned it up, broke out the Gemma part from the Whisper…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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AI-powered screen memory — captures, analyzes, and lets you search/chat your screen history. Powered by Gemma 4 . 100% local, 100% private. - ayushh0110/ScreenMind
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Google Gemma 4▲437Google's most intelligent open models to date
Apr 2026 · blog.google · its alternatives →
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Cai▲179Hi HN, Cai runs actions on your selection via ⌥C, pick an action (AI, shell, GitHub issue, Linear ticket), done. Bundled local model (MLX Community), create custom actions with prompts, scripts and more. Free, MIT. Built after my Raycast extension sat in review queue for 3+ months. Wanted no typing, no app switching, no cloud. Repo: https://github.com/cai-layer/cai Demo: https://youtu.be/LH2MYNQ_wsk
Apr 2026 · getcai.app · its alternatives →
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Gemma 2▲279Lightweight, state-of-the-art open models from Google
2024 · blog.google · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, Henry & Roman here from Cactus. A small, on-device model is fast and private, but sometimes wrong, but frontier models are getting expensive pretty fast. So, we post-trained Gemma 4 E2B post-trained to know when it's wrong. Every response comes with a confidence score between 0 and 1. Developers can accept the on-device when it's high, hand off to a bigger cloud model when it's low. By routing only 15-35% of queries to Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, Gemma-4-E2B matches Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite on most benchmarks. - ChartQA: 15-20% - LibriSpeech: 25-30% - MMBench, GigaSpeech, MMAU: 30-35% -…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
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Gemma 3n▲199Run powerful multimodal AI right on your phone
2025 · developers.googleblog.com · its alternatives →
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Beam.winfree tier, from $7/mo▲379Run AI agents on one Mac and use its windows on another
5d ago · beam.win · its alternatives →
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Mirowl▲96Search all your screenshots via a local OCR-powered AI
Jun 2026 · mirowl.com · its alternatives →
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OwnClip▲104Native macOS screen recorder with local-first AI privacy
Jun 2026 · ownclip.io · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, author here. SHARP is Apple's recent single-image 3D Gaussian splatting model (https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10685). Their reference code is PyTorch + a pretty heavy pipeline; I wanted to see if it could run in a browser with no server hop, so I exported the predictor to ONNX and ran it via onnxruntime-web with the WebGPU EP. What works: drop in an image, get a .ply you can download or preview live, all on your machine — your image never leaves the tab. The model is large (~2.4 GB sidecar) so first load is slow on a cold cache, but inference itself is a few seconds on…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Local▲107Super excited to launch our new app Local today. What we’ve learned at Base Compute over the last months is that running AI directly on your laptop or workstation gives you maximum privacy and it’s free, but it’s also a massive headache to configure. So we’ve decided what matters is making the experience completely frictionless for users. Local analyses the hardware of your laptop, optimises the AI for it, and recommends the best models for your specific device. It let’s you do what you’re doing with cloud AI already, just for free and on your own machine: Chatting with PDF’s, Recording and…
Aug 2026 · basecompute.co · its alternatives →
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I ported Microsoft's TRELLIS.2 (4B parameter image-to-3D model) to run on Apple Silicon via PyTorch MPS. The original requires CUDA with flash_attn, nvdiffrast, and custom sparse convolution kernels: none of which work on Mac. I replaced the CUDA-specific ops with pure-PyTorch alternatives: a gather-scatter sparse 3D convolution, SDPA attention for sparse transformers, and a Python-based mesh extraction replacing CUDA hashmap operations. Total changes are a few hundred lines across 9 files. Generates ~400K vertex meshes from single photos in about 3.5 minutes on M4 Pro (24GB). Not as fast as…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I wanted to know how fast a 26B mixture-of-experts model could run on a desktop CPU with no GPU. Got ~40 tok/s single-stream (lossless) and ~124 batched. The surprising part was the byte budget: for this model you compress the output head (32% of per-token bytes), not the experts (16%). The writeup has the bandwidth roofline and the dead-ends; the repo has the reproducible recipe. Happy to answer questions. Repo: https://github.com/arun-prasath2005/gemma4-cpu-moe
Jun 2026 · apeg.dev · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! I'm the author of mere.run a local first inference runtime built around an installable CLI. I believe that whenever possible we should use the stuff we already own (like our Mac laptops, decent machines gathering dust, our gaming PC) and the limited electrical power we have easy access to, like the socket in the wall next to most of us. We shouldn't have to send our data to the cloud hoping some T&C will prevent it from being used in a way that we'd regret. Most of the local AI solutions are technical, involved, and land a curious body in some package hell. People are optimizing for…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21TF
I’d originally launched my app: Private LLM[1][2] on HN around 10 months ago, with a single RedPajama Chat 3B model. The app has come a long way since then. About a month ago, I added support for 4-bit OmniQuant quantized Mixtral 8x7B Instruct model, and it seems to outperform Q4 models at inference speed and Q8 models at text generation quality, while consuming only about 24GB of RAM[3] at 8k context length. The trick is: a) to use a better quantization algorithm and b) to use unquantized embeddings and the MoE gates (the overhead is quite small). Other notable features include many more…
2024 · its alternatives →
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Auto-detects your hardware to recommend the best Gemma 4
Apr 2026 · gemmamatch.com · its alternatives →
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Open-source AI playground for image & video generation
Apr 2026 · gemma4.site · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →