Best local LLM for imac m4

IBM's edge-class hybrid MoE with 7B total and only 1B active parameters — Apache 2.0 licensed and built for embedded and low-cost serving.

A 14B dense model from Alibaba that matches Qwen 2.5 32B Base on STEM and code, with the same hybrid thinking system as the rest of the Qwen 3 family. The pragmatic sweet spot for a single 24GB GPU.

Microsoft's 14B reasoner that beats R1-Distill-Llama-70B on AIME and GPQA with 50x fewer parameters. MIT-licensed, English-first, with a 32K context.

DeepSeek's R1 reasoning distilled into Qwen 14B under MIT. AIME24 69.7 and MATH-500 93.9 — beats o1-mini on most reasoning benchmarks.

A French-sovereign 7B model from OpenLLM-France, backed by CNRS and LINAGORA, with a fully transparent and auditable training corpus.

A 7B DeepSeek model distilled from R1 671B with explicit chain-of-thought reasoning. Surprisingly strong on AIME and MATH for its size.

Alibaba's 8B dense model with a toggleable thinking mode and broad multilingual coverage. Punches well above its weight for an 8B and runs comfortably on a single consumer GPU.