Best local LLM for macbook air m3

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.

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.

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.

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.