u/vaingirls

I used to think that I could never do local models, 'cause I have an ancient PC that was mid even in its heyday. And people suggesting local are always like "get Gemma 32B" as if that's the only one worth getting, and when you realize your PC can't even remotely run it you just give up...

But there are models such as gemma-4-e4b (it apparently has 7.5b parameters despite the misleading name?) and qwen3.5-9b that even my PC can run (a bit slowly but whatever), and those are... good? Their answers are thoughtful and nuanced - you could mistake them for answer from a frontier model. And their personalities are nice even by default, let alone once you write your own system prompt and finetune their settings (for example a bit more temperature can be fun).

Granted, I haven't tried anything extremely complicated with them yet, and the context is limited (can't do long ass conversations), but at least for me this is lots of fun and definitely worth it (well, it's free, so... ). Also somehow reassuring that even if ALL the frontier models raised their prices sky high with zero free usage, at least I have my own little robots at home.

This is some BS - I get limiting the amount of files I can upload, but being unable to even write pure text until the time limit seems like some poorly planned nonsense? It also says "chat without files" as if I COULD just continue without uploading files, yet the option to send anything is greyed out. Has this been a thing for long? Seems ridiculous.

Ok, probably not. It was obviously limited in capabilities. But it was the first model I tried and I have fond memories of it!

Its language was often overly "formal" in a wannabe-whimsical purple-prose-way, which got grating, but its personality felt... somehow super wholesome and earnest? Like it tried its best rather than intentionally holding back.

And I even found some ways around the cliche purple prose - it did a decent job when writing in first person and given the personality of the narrator. I actually got laughs from making it write with some unhinged personality - it was surprisingly flexible with style (actually matching the personality I described), unlike what I've experienced with GPT-5s. Or maybe this is all rose colored nostalgy glasses and it was awful, idk.