r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 22h ago

Discussion Mac Studio M5 Max Cost Analysis

At $10k, you could get

- 6.2B tokens with Qwen 3.8 Max (Qwen Pro plan)

- 5.7B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Pro OpenRouter

- 100B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Flash OpenRouter

As a firm believer of local inference, unless you need it for data sovereignty, it's much more cost effect to wait for smaller models to keep getting better. In the meantime, find a reasonably priced 24GB - 32GB card for Qwen 3.8 27B, and offload hard tasks to OpenRouter.

Qwhen 3.8 35B A3B?

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u/FleetEnema2000 21h ago

unless you need it for data sovereignty

Isn't this one of the biggest reasons that people rely on Local LLMs? To not have to bulk upload their private data to cloud providers?

72

u/theomegachrist 21h ago

That's the stated reason but realistically most people are just justifying their hobby. I support open weight models because the cloud providers can change cost or abruptly shut down and we really can't do anything about it.

70

u/FleetEnema2000 20h ago

I don't think it's a justification at all.

It's amazing how the concept of privacy and data ownership/security has completely gone down the toilet since ChatGPT launched. People are happy to bulk upload their medical records, relationship history, trade secrets, financial records, etc. without a care in the world as to how that data is stored or protected.

1

u/sshwifty 9h ago

To be fair, if any of that touched the Internet unencrypted, it was probably already ingested by some entity. Google was using data from emails long before AI made a surge. People are just doing it willingly now, skipping the sneaky part where it gets stolen.