Reasoning models that run on 8 GB

16 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 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 8 GB