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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to OpenGraviton – Run 500B+ parameter models on a consumer Mac Mini

Hi HN, I built OpenGraviton, an open-source AI inference engine designed to push the limits of running extremely large models on consumer hardware. The system combines several techniques to drastically reduce memory and compute requirements: • 1.58-bit ternary quantization ({-1, 0, +1}) for ~10x compression • dynamic sparsity with Top-K pruning and MoE routing • mmap-based layer streaming to load weights directly from NVMe SSDs • speculative decoding to improve generation throughput These allow models far larger than system RAM to run locally. In early benchmarks, OpenGraviton reduced…

OpenGraviton is an open-source AI inference engine that enables running extremely large language models on consumer Mac hardware by combining ternary quantization, dynamic sparsity, layer streaming from NVMe storage… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Hi HN, I built OpenGraviton, an open-source AI inference engine that pushes the limits of running extremely large LLMs on consumer hardware. By combining 1.58-bit ternary quantization, dynamic sparsity with Top-K pruning and MoE routing, and mmap-based layer streaming, OpenGraviton can run models far larger than your system RAM—even on a Mac Mini. Early benchmarks: TinyLlama-1.1B drops from ~2GB (FP16) to ~0.24GB with ternary quantization. At 140B scale, models that normally require ~280GB fit within ~35GB packed. Optimized for Apple Silicon with Metal + C++ tensor unpacking, plus…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    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 →

  3. 3

    AI models that run on an inference cloud optimized for speed

    May 2026 · generalcompute.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    I wanted to share our new speech to text model, and the library to use them effectively. We're a small startup (six people, sub-$100k monthly GPU budget) so I'm proud of the work the team has done to create streaming STT models with lower word-error rates than OpenAI's largest Whisper model. Admittedly Large v3 is a couple of years old, but we're near the top the HF OpenASR leaderboard, even up against Nvidia's Parakeet family. Anyway, I'd love to get feedback on the models and software, and hear about what people might build with it.

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hi HN, OpenAI recently released a model for automatic speech recognition called Whisper [0]. I decided to reimplement the inference of the model from scratch using C/C++. To achieve this I implemented a minimalistic tensor library in C and ported the high-level architecture of the model in C++. The entire code is less than 8000 lines of code and is contained in just 2 source files without any third-party dependencies. The Github project is here: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp With this implementation I can very easily build and run the model - “make…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hey everyone! Excited to be able to share the release of `InvokeAI 2.0 - A Stable Diffusion Toolkit`, an open source project that aims to provide both enthusiasts and professionals a suite of robust image creation tools. Optimized for efficiency, InvokeAI needs only ~3.5GB of VRAM to generate a 512x768 image (and less for smaller images), and is compatible with Windows/Linux/Mac (M1 & M2). InvokeAI was one of the earliest forks off of the core CompVis repo (formerly lstein/stable-diffusion), and recently evolved into a full-fledged community driven and open source stable…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    I spent a lot of time and money on this rather big side project of mine that attempts to replicate the mechanistic interpretability research on proprietary LLMs that was quite popular this year and produced great research papers by Anthropic [1], OpenAI [2] and Deepmind [3]. I am quite proud of this project and since I consider myself the target audience for HackerNews did I think that maybe some of you would appreciate this open research replication as well. Happy to answer any questions or face any feedback. Cheers [1]…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    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 →

  10. 10
    Opper AI▲229

    Hey HN! After the Car Wash Test post got quite a big discussion going (400+ comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128138), I spent the past few weeks building a tool so anyone can run these kinds of questions and get structured results. No signup and free to use. You type a question, define answer options, pick up to 50 models at a time from a pool of 200+, and they all answer independently under identical conditions. No system prompt, structured output, same setup for every model. You can also run a debate round where models see each other's reasoning and get a…

    Jul 2026 · opper.ai · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Massive local model speedup on Apple Silicon with MLX

    Apr 2026 · ollama.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    The open-source era of 1M context intelligence

    Apr 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    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 →

  14. 14
    ZeroGPU▲298

    The compute efficient layer for AI inference

    Jun 2026 · zerogpu.ai · its alternatives →

  15. 15WM

    Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…

    2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hi HN! We're Gabriel & Viraj, and we're excited to open source TensorZero. To be a little cheeky, TensorZero is an open-source platform that helps LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products. 1. Integrate our model gateway 2. Send metrics or feedback 3. Unlock compounding improvements in quality, cost, and latency It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying: • Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead • Observability: inference & feedback → your database • Optimization: better prompts, models, inference strategies • Experimentation:…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Deploying vision models is time consuming and tedious. Setting up dependencies. Fixing conflicts. Configuring TRT acceleration. Flashing (and re-flashing) NVIDIA Jetsons. A streamlined, developer-friendly solution for inference is needed. We, the Roboflow team, have been hard at work open sourcing Inference, an open source vision deployment solution. Our solution is designed with developers in mind, offering a HTTP-based interface. Run models on your hardware without having to write architecture-specific inference code. Here's a demo showing how to go from a model to GPU inference on a video…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi HN, We just opened public access to Qwen3‑Coder‑480B‑A35B‑Instruct via a REST&#x2F;SDK API. Why it might be interesting: - Fully open-source (Apache‑2.0): https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;QwenLM&#x2F;Qwen3-Coder - 480B params (35B active MoE), long context up to 1M tokens with YaRN - Matches Claude Sonnet&#x2F;GPT‑4o on SWE-Bench Verified (81.6%) - Free tier: 100K tokens&#x2F;month

    2023 · netmind.ai · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    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 →

  20. 20IB

    We wanted to do something very challenging to prove to ourselves that we can do anything we put our mind to. The reasoning for why we chose to build a toy TPU specifically is fairly simple: - Building a chip for ML workloads seemed cool - There was no well-documented open source repo for an ML accelerator that performed both inference and training None of us have real professional experience in hardware design, which, in a way, made the TPU even more appealing since we weren't able to estimate exactly how difficult it would be. As we worked on the initial stages of this project, we…

    2025 · tinytpu.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Fast multimodal-native inference at scale

    Dec 2025 · gmicloud.ai · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Our goal with this project is to build a completely open source, state of the art turn detection model that can be used in any voice AI application. I've been experimenting with LLM voice conversations since GPT-4 was first released. (There's a previous front page Show HN about Pipecat, the open source voice AI orchestration framework I work on. [1]) It's been almost two years, and for most of that time, I've been expecting that someone would "solve" turn detection. We all built initial, pretty good 80&#x2F;20 versions of turn detection on top of VAD (voice activity detection) models. And…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hi all! This morning, we released a new Apache 2.0 licensed model on HuggingFace for detecting hallucinations in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems. What we've found is that even when given a "simple" instruction like "summarize the following news article," every LLM that's available hallucinates to some extent, making up details that never existed in the source article -- and some of them quite a bit. As a RAG provider and proponents of ethical AI, we want to see LLMs get better at this. We've published an open source model, a blog more thoroughly describing our methodology (and…

    2023 · vectara.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Private inference app that lets you see the token entropy, explore and change the token probabilities. Just released on macOS, iOS version next then other platforms. Here's a demo of it in action running DeepSeek Terminus: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;kts098EL2PQ Would love to hear any feedback or feature requests from the community.

    2025 · inferencer.com · 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 →