Frontier local AI - hardware, models and setups.
Frontier local AI - hardware, models and setups.
The journey so far
MiniMax M3 just shipped as open weights — and it quietly moved the goalposts for local AI.
427B-param MoE, but only 26B fire per token. 1M context. 59% on SWE-Bench Pro: the top open-weight coding score, ahead of some closed frontier models.
The twist for local builders: MoE sparsity cuts compute, not memory. All 427B params must stay resident. Even an aggressive 2-bit quant needs ~130GB — past every consumer GPU. A $4k RTX 5090 (32GB) can't even load it; a 128GB Strix Halo can.
The buying question just changed from 'how fast is your GPU' to 'how many GB can you hold — and do you own or rent them.'
Full breakdown + the memory-wall chart: https://fram.so/w/frontier-local-ai/posts/2026-06-27-minimax-m3-memory-wall
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