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Fine-tune an 8B LLM on a 4 GB laptop GPU
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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
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It's a chrome extension that automatically loads the specs from the Hugging Face model card into the calculation. > To test it, install the extension (no registration/key needed) and navigate to a HF model page. Then click the "VRAM" icon on the top right to open the sidepanel. You can specify quantization, batch size, sequence length, etc. Works for inference & fine-tuning. If it does not fit on the specified GPUs, it gives you an advise on how to still run it (e.g. lowering precision). It is inspired at my work, where we were constantly exporting metrics from HF to estimate required…
2025 · chromewebstore.google.com
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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.
22d ago · github.com
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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
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2016 · github.com
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Hi HN, I built llm.sql, an LLM inference framework that reimagines the LLM execution pipeline as a series of structured SQL queries atop SQLite. The motivation: Edge LLMs are getting better, but hardware remains a bottleneck, especially RAM (size and bandwidth). When available memory is less than the model size and KV cache, the OS incurs page faults and swaps pages using LRU-like strategies, resulting in throughput degradation that's hard to notice and even harder to debug. In fact, the memory access pattern during LLM inference is deterministic - we know exactly which weights are needed…
Apr 2026
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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
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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
2025 · github.com
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Kimi K3 has 2.78 trillion parameters and ships as 1.42 TB of weights. It clearly does not fit in the memory of a laptop. But K3 is a Mixture-of-Experts model. For each token, only a small fraction of its 896 experts per layer is activated. That changes the problem: the entire model does not need to be resident in RAM, as long as the weights required by each token can be reached quickly enough. We built WASTE — the Weight-Aware Streaming Tensor Engine — to explore that idea. WASTE keeps the dense, repeatedly used part of the model resident in memory, stores the routed experts in an…
Jul 2026
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Built this as a guide for users of my hosting service. Everything here was run on a real instance. The Mesa/LLVM dependency is genuinely painful on a 1GB disk, and I couldn't find a way around it. WindowMaker won the window manager battle purely on dependency chain cleanliness; it pulls in no GTK, no Python, no audio stack. Happy to answer questions about any of the choices made. Screenshots at the end.
Mar 2026 · tierhive.com
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Hey there, we fused all 24 layers of Qwen3.5-0.8B (a hybrid DeltaNet + Attention model) into a single CUDA kernel launch and made it open-source for everyone to try it. On an RTX 3090 power-limited to 220W: - 411 tok/s vs 229 tok/s on M5 Max (1.8x) - 1.87 tok/J, beating M5 Max efficiency - 1.55x faster decode than llama.cpp on the same GPU - 3.4x faster prefill The RTX 3090 launched in 2020. Everyone calls it power-hungry. It isn't, the software is. The conventional wisdom NVIDIA is fast but thirsty. Apple Silicon is slow but sips power. Pick a side. With stock frameworks, the…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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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
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Hello everyone, After recreating the accuracy/rough speed from David Page's implementation in hlb-CIFAR10 0.1.0 (18.1s on an A100, SXM4, Colab), it was down to some basic NVIDIA kernel profiling to figure out which operations were the long poles in the tent. Perhaps (somewhat?) unsurprisingly, the NCHW NHWC thrash was the worst part, but unfortunately the GhostBatchNorm was a barrier even using the faster-on-Ampere channels_last memory format. A quick note before continuing -- some may find the use of a convolutional network and on CIFAR10 to be curious. A quick answer to that would be…
2023 · github.com
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Hi HN! I built LLMKube, a Kubernetes operator for deploying GPU-accelerated LLMs in production. One command gets you from zero to inference with full observability. Why this exists: Regulated industries (healthcare, defense, finance) need air-gapped LLM deployments, but existing tools are either single-node only (Ollama) or lack GPU optimization and SLO enforcement. LLMKube bridges the gap. What's working: - 17x speedup with NVIDIA GPUs (64 tok/s on Llama 3.2 3B vs 4.6 tok/s CPU) - One command: llmkube deploy llama-3b --gpu (auto CUDA setup, scheduling, layer offloading) -…
Nov 2025 · github.com
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ran this over the weekend. stack was Llama 3.2 3B running locally + Keiro Research API for retrieval. 85.0% on 4,326 questions. where that lands: ROMA (357B): 93.9% OpenDeepSearch (671B): 88.3% Sonar Pro: 85.8% Llama 3.2 3B + Keiro: 85.0% the systems ahead of us are running models 100-200x larger. that's why they're ahead. not better retrieval, not better prompting — just way more parameters. the interesting part is how small the gap is despite that. 3 points behind a 671B model. 0.8 behind Sonar Pro. at some point you have to ask what you're actually buying with all that compute for this…
Mar 2026 · keirolabs.cloud
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Posted before, but wanted to share if you want an open source alternative to OpenAI fine-tuning, give Unsloth a try! Phi 3.5 was just released, and is distilled from GPT4. Unsloth makes finetuning 2x faster, uses 70% less VRAM + has no accuracy degradations. We rewrite all backprop steps and reduce FLOPs and write everything in Triton (JIT low level CUDA). If you want to own the weights after fine-tuning, give Unsloth a spin! I have free Colabs and Kaggle notebooks as well at https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth
2024 · colab.research.google.com
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Hey HN! After using a combination of Unsloth and Axolotl a lot, and finding it generally painful to figure out the right performance tuning for things like batch sizing and multi-GPU sharding, I wrote a small Python lib that sets up known-good LoRA training configurations for Llama 3.1 8B and 70B Instruct, and includes helpers for distilling from larger models or training on serverless finetuning platforms, and includes a walkthrough for distilling DeepSeek-R1 into a Llama 3.1 8B LoRA... But you can use it for pretty much any finetuning task, not just distilling large models!
2025 · github.com
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Just added support for Llama-3 models to our AI app platform Promptly. We decided to try Groq cloud for powering these models and the results have so far been pretty good comparing Llama-3-70B with GPT-4 Turbo. Put an app together to compare these models. Check it out at https://trypromptly.com/a/groq-llama-3-70b-vs-gpt-4-turbo. https://trypromptly.com/s/iQG7EoJ4Pm is a sample output comparison between Llama-3-70B and GPT-4 turbo. https://youtu.be/1UChY6EDwFA shows the inference speed of Groq compared to GPT-4.
2024 · trypromptly.com
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Hi HN, I’m one of the authors of this post. We’ve updated Docker Model Runner to support vLLM alongside the existing llama.cpp backend. The goal is to bridge the gap between local prototyping (often done with GGUF/llama.cpp) and high-throughput production (often done with Safetensors/vLLM) using a consistent Docker workflow. Key technical details: Auto-routing: The tool detects the model format. If you pull a GGUF model, it routes to llama.cpp. If you pull a Safetensors model, it routes to vLLM. API: It exposes an OpenAI-compatible API (/v1/chat/completions), so the…
Nov 2025 · github.com
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I work on inference scheduling — KV cache-aware routing, load balancing across GPU workers, that kind of thing. I wanted something like k9s but for my inference stack. Nothing existed, so I built it. llmtop is a real-time terminal dashboard for LLM inference workers. It scrapes the Prometheus /metrics endpoints that vLLM, SGLang, and LMCache already expose and shows everything in one view: KV cache usage, queue depth, TTFT/ITL latencies (P50/P99 from histogram buckets), token throughput, prefix cache hit rates. Color-coded — red means go fix it. ``` brew install…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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After seeing a cool demo of a hack on Twitter, I built a cross platform version of it that works well and uses streaming. From anywhere on Mac and Linux, trigger Ollama and optionally feed it your clipboard. I built it yesterday and it's already very useful to me. I'm pretty excited about it and wanted to share!
2024 · github.com
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