A 26-billion-parameter model running in about 2 GB of RAM on an 8 GB MacBook

A new open-source Swift and Metal runtime, turbo-fieldfare, runs Gemma 4 26B-A4B inference in roughly 2 GB of RAM on any Apple Silicon Mac, including the 8 GB machines. The author states the motivation plainly: memory got expensive, so a 26-billion-parameter model was given a 2 GB budget.

What it means The cheapest hedge against memory prices is needing less memory - this is the same squeeze that is moving chip stocks, showing up as an engineering constraint on the laptop you already own.