Pass IndexThe State of AISign in

Speech models that run on 16 GB

51 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 text aloud. They are usually priced per character, which makes the arithmetic simple: a thousand characters is roughly a paragraph. The real choices are the voice itself, whether you may clone one, how much control you have over emotion and pacing, and latency — a model that sounds wonderful in a rendered file may be too slow to hold a conversation.

Wider

Speech modelsModels that run on 16 GB