Best local LLM for mac 24gb

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.

OpenAI's compact open-weight MoE with 3.6B active out of 21B total parameters. Matches o3-mini on a laptop-class GPU under Apache 2.0.

Baidu's compact reasoning MoE with 3B active parameters out of 21B total. Fast inference thanks to the small active set, with Chinese-language strength.

Arcee AI's US-built MoE with 3B active parameters out of 26B total. Apache-licensed, fast in practice, and tuned for agent-style workloads.

Allen AI's OLMoE is the only MoE released with weights, training data, and code fully open — 7B total with 1.3B active, matching Llama2-13B-Chat quality.