Reading documents models that run on 8 GB

20 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 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.

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Reading documents models Models that run on 8 GB