YouTuber Dave Lee of Dave2D fame has demonstrated how Apple’s new Mac Studio equipped with an M3 Ultra chip can efficiently run a huge version of the DeepSeek R1 AI model locally, provided that users spec the machine with the maximum 512GB of memory.
According to Lee’s testing, the 671 billion parameter AI model can be executed directly on Apple’s high-end workstation, but it requires substantial memory resources, consuming 404GB of storage and requiring the manual allocation of 448GB of video RAM through Terminal commands.
The M3 Ultra’s unified memory architecture is key to this performance, allowing the system to handle a 4-bit quantized version of DeepSeek R1 efficiently. The quantization slightly reduces accuracy, but it maintains all parameters and delivers approximately 17-18 tokens per second, which is sufficient for many practical applications.
Read more at MacRumors.com