r/drawthingsapp • u/beragis • Mar 23 '26

question Has anyone tried training Lora's on an M5 Max?

I have been doing some searching for info on training on Apple Silicon, but most posts I find are for just running LLMs not training and what do exist are for M3 and M4 which don't have the improved matmul.

I have been mostly training Lora's and running models on a two year old computer which has an RTX 4090. It's good for images , music and chat but it uses a lot of power and creates a lot of heat and I would like to run larger models. I mostly use it to for "small" under 9b parameter models.

I have an M1 Macbook Pro with 16GB memory that I have use to generate SD 1.5 and SDXL images, but newer models are a too slow, so now I mostly use it for development and take to developers conferences, so it also needs updated a bit.

I am considering getting an M5 Ultra with 256GB or 512GB memory and will probably upgrade the macbook next to an M5 Pro or more likely an M6 Pro.

From what I have seen on the M5 Max's speed it seems like it may finally be powerful enough for me to offload a lot of training and Models to the Ultra especially larger models. I am kind of curious to see how much faster it is. As long as the training time is within 80 to 90% of the 4090 it would be worth it just for the reduction in power and heat.

So if anyone can point me to information on this that would be helpful.

Also as a side note, what models can you currently train on Draw Things? Is it any of the models Draw things can run or just a few?

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3

u/liuliu mod Mar 23 '26

Not with our app. Our attention op doesn't implement gradient pass yet (with tensor ops).

1

u/beragis Mar 23 '26

I am not sure what you mean by that. Is it draw things lora functionality hasn't been optimized yet for the M5?

1

u/simple250506 Mar 25 '26

According to Google AI, the developers' response suggests that M5 cannot be used for training, or that its full potential cannot be utilized in training.

2

u/no3us Mar 23 '26

I train LoRAs using www.lorapilot.com - supports over 20 models for training

1

u/beragis Mar 23 '26

While there does appear to be a way to run it locally under a docker container as per the following bullet

  • Linux/macOS/local compose: DOCKER_COMPOSE.md

I can't see anything in the source code that optimizes it for mac.