Running a local model is usually super expensive because you need to buy those crazy expensive Mac studios or other setups that might cost upwards of like 5000 to 10000 But Alibaba just dropped a local model that is so small that you can run it on a 600 Mac mini comfortably Im gonna test it out over this next week and Ill let you know how good it is If you like me and didnt want to spend a bunch of money on a local model and just bought the Mac mini instead with a good subscription this is a good alternative for you to run two models on one machine and to offload some work to the local model that doesnt cost any money openclaw aiagent ai claude

So today, Alibaba, who owns Quen, which is a local model that you can run on a Mac Mini, just released a new Quen 3.5 small model series. Basically, what this means is that you no longer need to buy these $10,000 Mac Studios to run local models on. I still believe that most people do not need local models. The benefits from it and the hardware costs do not really match up. I still think just get the cheapest Mac Mini and then get a really good subscription. But in this case, you can just feed it into your OpenClaw, especially if you have two like I do. Or you can just say, hey, on that second one, the one that we're not using that much, let's download this onto it. And these two Mac Minis that I'm running are the cheapest Mac Minis possible, 16 gigabytes of RAM. But these new smaller models are not big at all. They take five to seven gigabytes of RAM. Out of 16 gigabytes, it could totally process this. I'm going to test it and I'll let you guys know how good it is. But basically, if this ends up working well, you can get this local model for free. You can have zero API cost. It'll be completely private. And you can run it 24-7 on a $600 Mac Mini. You can also have that in addition to whatever subscription you're already using. So you have two models where this model that you're paying for that has a cost does the big heavy work and it doesn't do the small stuff it doesn't need to. And the second one that runs for free 24-7 can do all these small things that you don't want to charge costs for.