Best local LLM for mac 48gb

Alibaba's Qwen 3 MoE with 30B total and just 3B active parameters, supporting hybrid thinking mode. MMLU 81.4, AIME24 80.4, 100+ languages, Apache 2.0.

IBM's hybrid Mamba-2 + MoE model with 32B total and 9B active parameters, engineered to slash long-context memory use by roughly 70% versus comparable transformers under Apache 2.0.

Qwen 3 VL's sweet spot: a 30B MoE with 3B active parameters and 256k context. Delivers most of the 235B's quality at a fraction of the hardware cost.

Kakao's agentic 30B MoE (3B active) with native hybrid thinking and Korean-first training. Apache 2.0 with MLA attention and 131k context.

Alibaba's omni-modal 30B MoE (3B active) with streaming speech, 119-language ASR, and Apache 2.0 licensing. The most accessible truly omnimodal open model.

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.