Comment by simonw

The pelican is excellent for a 16.8GB quantized local model: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/22/qwen36-27b/

I ran it on an M5 Pro with 128GB of RAM, but it only needs ~20GB of that. I expect it will run OK on a 32GB machine.

Performance numbers:

  Reading: 20 tokens, 0.4s, 54.32 tokens/s
  Generation: 4,444 tokens, 2min 53s, 25.57 tokens/s

I like it better than the pelican I got from Opus 4.7 the other day: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/16/qwen-beats-opus/