Is Gemma 4 E4B still the best sub-8B local model for tool-calling assistants on Mac?
Beautiful_Bus_9237 · reddit · 2026-11-02
A user running a local personal assistant on a 24GB M5 Pro Mac (MLX via oMLX) needs reliable tool calling across mail, calendar, notes, and files, multi-step chaining, long-doc synthesis/extraction, and multimodal text+image+audio support.
After testing, they find Gemma 4 E4B still the best option, but since it's 4 months old they're asking whether any new sub-8B (under 6GB) model beats it on tool calling, chaining, long synthesis, and fact extraction. They've tried LING 3.0 tiny, the LFM family, and Qwen 3.5 4B/9B (low quant) without success, and are soliciting recommendations from the community.
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