The fastest way to run Mixtral 8x7B on Apple Silicon Macs
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…
In plain words
Private LLM is a macOS and iOS application that runs large language models locally on Apple Silicon devices. It supports multiple models including a 4-bit quantized Mixtral 8x7B that operates efficiently on 24GB of RAM while maintaining fast inference speed and high text quality. The app offers features like grammar correction, summarization, Siri integration, and Apple Shortcuts support, making it suitable for users seeking private, on-device AI capabilities without cloud dependencies.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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 downloadable models, support for App Intents (Siri, Apple Shortcuts), on-device grammar correction, summarization etc with macOS services and an iOS version (universal app), also with many smaller downloadable models and support for App Intents. There's a small community of users building and sharing LLM based shortcuts on the App's discord. Last week, I also shipped support for the bilingual Yi-34B Chat model, which consumes ~18GB of RAM. iOS users and users with low memory Macs can download the related Yi-6B Chat model. Unlike most popular offline LLM apps out there, this app uses mlc-llm for inference and not llama.cpp. Also, all models in the app are quantized with OmniQuant[4] quantization and not RTN quantization. [1]: https://privatellm.app/ [2]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/private-llm-local-ai-chatbot/id6448106860 [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AE8yXIWSAA [4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13137
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