Images models that run on 8 GB

64 models with published weights that fit in 8 GB — a phone, a base iPad, an Air. Counted at four-bit quantisation, weights only, leaving the machine about a third of its memory and a gigabyte for context: room for roughly 7 billion parameters. A mixture of experts is counted in full, because it is held in full even though only a few experts compute.

The memory of a phone, a base iPad or an entry-level laptop. What fits is small: models of a few billion parameters, quick and cheap to run, good at summarising, classifying and simple extraction, and out of their depth on long reasoning. This is also where on-device makes the most sense, because the alternative is a network round trip for something that takes a moment.

Models that make pictures from a description, and increasingly edit the ones you give them. Priced per image, sometimes by resolution, so the rate card reads nothing like a language model's. Beyond the look of the output, the practical differences are whether it can render legible text, whether it will edit rather than regenerate, and what the licence says about selling what comes out.

Wider

Images models Models that run on 8 GB