Buy 4 Mac Studios and run a 1T-param FP4 model locally to beat API pricing
DimitrisPapail · x · 2026-09-30
ML researcher Dimitris Papailiopoulos responds to the debate over "salary-level" agent subscription/API costs with an alternative: buy 4 Mac Studios with 512GB RAM each ($40k total, an O(1) amortized cost) and run the best FP4-quantized 1-trillion-parameter model locally. For power users, he argues this is serious long-run competition to API subscriptions. The original thread adds that >250B-parameter models become viable if priced at salary level, though how that translates to market cap remains unclear.
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