Reading documents models that run on 16 GB

24 models with published weights that fit in 16 GB — the common laptop. Counted at four-bit quantisation, weights only, leaving the machine about a third of its memory and a gigabyte for context: room for roughly 16 billion parameters. A mixture of experts is counted in full, because it is held in full even though only a few experts compute.

The commonest laptop configuration, and the point where a genuinely useful model runs locally: fourteen billion parameters at four-bit fits with room to spare for the context. Expect a capable general assistant that will not match the frontier, and remember that anything else the machine is doing competes for the same memory.

Models that read documents — scans, photographs of pages, forms, tables — and return text or structure. The interesting difference between them is not whether they can read a clean page, which they all can, but what they do with a table, a stamp, a handwritten margin or a column that breaks across pages. Several are priced per page rather than per token, which makes them easy to budget and hard to compare with the rest.

Wider

Reading documents models Models that run on 16 GB