starcoder2:latest f67ae0f64584 1.7 GB 3 days ago
phi3:latest d184c916657e 2.2 GB 3 weeks ago
deepseek-coder-v2:latest 8577f96d693e 8.9 GB 3 weeks ago
llama3:8b-instruct-q8_0 1b8e49cece7f 8.5 GB 3 weeks ago
dolphin-mistral:latest 5dc8c5a2be65 4.1 GB 3 weeks ago
codeqwen:latest df352abf55b1 4.2 GB 3 weeks ago
llama3:latest 365c0bd3c000 4.7 GB 4 weeks ago
I mostly use starcoder2 with Continue for code autocomplete, the big deepseek coder is a bit slow (I can feel it thinking), but it and the regular llama3 are good for chatbot type programming questions.
I don’t really have anything to compare the M1 performance to. I guess the 8GB models output text a little slower than the web versions of the same models, and the 4GB ones about the same. Using ollama in the terminal, there’s sometimes a 0.5-2 second pause before it starts outputting. Not with phi3 though - it’s surprisingly snappy for the quality of answers.
Love the effort you’ve put into this question. You’ve clearly done some quality research and thinking.
When I asked myself this same question a couple of years ago, I ended up just buying a second hand Synology NAS to use alongside my mini-pc. That would meet your criteria, and avoids the (I’m not sure what magnitude) reliability risk of using disks connected over USB. It’s more proprietary than I’d like, but it’s battle tested and reliable for me.