I wonder how language models like these run locally on a machine. Is it realistic for a dev with a standard PC, or do you need dedicated hardware like a pro GPU? What are the trade-offs in terms of performance and accuracy when running locally?
Do LLMs like Mistral work locally?
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Before joining a fully remote team a year ago, I was already testing my local little AIs for everyday development tasks. My setup? An i7-12700K + 32GB RAM + RTX 3080 (a 2021 beast that still costs an arm and a leg second-hand). At first, I thought I could do without the GPU for Mistral 7B—big mistake, even "light" models like 0.2B didn’t do much on CPU alone.
The worst moment? When I tried running Mixtral 8x7B locally for personal benchmarks. The first attempt heated up my living room more than the model: 1.5 hours for 500 tokens, with the GPU hitting 98°C. I had to downsample to 4-bit QLoRA, which sacrificed precision but made it usable. Since then, I’ve kept a 7B model quantized to 8GB on my work laptop (no dedicated GPU) for quick tests, even if the output is… creative.
The key trade-off: quality vs. convenience. Locally, you sacrifice precision and speed to keep your data private, but with a mid-range GPU, you gain smooth performance without breaking the bank. Personally, I upgraded after my old PC maxed out in 10 minutes on a simple test.