Best local LLM for macbook air m1

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 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.

A 7B vision-language model from Alibaba with state-of-the-art results in its class, scoring 95.7 on DocVQA. Handles hour-long video, bounding-box grounding, and multilingual OCR.

Alibaba's first true omni-modal open model — text, image, audio, and video in, with text and speech out. A research-grade preview rather than a production-ready release.

Microsoft's 5.6B multimodal model — text, image, and audio in, text out — using a Mixture-of-LoRAs design. Accepts roughly 2.8 hours of audio per request.

Allen AI's fully open 7B model releasing weights, training data, and code under Apache 2.0. The reference choice for reproducible LLM research.