Reasoning models that run on 16 GB

33 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 plan before they answer, spending extra tokens on working the problem through. They win on mathematics, hard code and anything with several steps, and they are measured on boards like GPQA, AIME and ARC-AGI. The catch is what the thinking costs: reasoning is billed as output tokens, so the same model can cost several times more per answer at a high effort than a low one, and for a question that needed one turn you have paid for a monologue.

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Reasoning models Models that run on 16 GB