UC Berkeley just open-sourced FreeToken.
(2–4x faster local LLM inference than Ollama)
the results are wild:
- Qwen3.6-35B on an 8GB GPU at 39.3 tokens/s
- DeepSeek-V4-Flash 284B on a 32GB GPU at 22 tokens/s
- GLM-5.2 753B on a 96GB GPU at 14.9 tokens/s
a 35B model at 16-bit precision needs about 70GB just for its weights. even at 4 bits it is close to 18GB, and FreeToken serves it on an 8GB GPU.
let me explain how:
all three models mentioned above are Mixture-of-Experts, and that is what FreeToken takes advantage of. each layer holds hundreds of separate experts plus a small router that picks a few of them per token.
Qwen3.6-35B activates roughly 3B of its 35B parameters per token. DeepSeek-V4-Flash picks 6 of 256 experts per layer, so 13B of its 284B run at a time.
so compute was never the bottleneck. the weights a single step touches fit comfortably on a consumer GPU.
every expert the router might pick still has to exist somewhere. they sit in system RAM, and the GPU keeps a cache of the ones the model has been using recently.
so everything comes down to what happens when the router picks an expert that is not on the GPU.
there are two ways to serve that miss:
1. copy it over PCIe and run it on the GPU
2. run it on the CPU, where it already lives
both read from the same system memory, so they compete for one pool of bandwidth instead of adding to each other. existing engines pick one option and freeze it when the model loads.
but routing changes on every token, so a fixed choice misses most of what the model asks for.
FreeToken measures both bandwidths on your machine and splits each step's misses between the two paths in proportion. the GPU and CPU results then merge exactly, with no approximation.
two machines with the same GPU can end up wanting opposite strategies, which I did not expect. a 5090 in a gaming desktop should push nearly everything over PCIe, while an 8GB laptop is better off computing most misses on the CPU.
none of that is readable off a spec sheet, so the engine profiles it once per machine.
the second half of the design is about agents. coding agents constantly rewrite their own history, and every edit normally forces thousands of tokens back through prefill.
FreeToken saves its checkpoints at the exact boundaries agent frameworks cut on, so it only reprocesses the new part. its slowest first token stays under 44 seconds, while llama.cpp peaks at 232 and KTransformers at 946.
it serves the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs under Apache 2.0, so Claude Code and Codex can point at it directly.
releasing weights publicly decides who can download a model, not who can afford to run one. frontier open models keep shipping, and running them still assumes a rented cluster.
meanwhile there are over a hundred million consumer machines with discrete GPUs sitting mostly idle. closing that gap was never a hardware problem, and work like this is what turns open weights into something you can actually use.
paper: https://t.co/bIOXIiBsXT
repo: https://t.co/uxWAP5PYx7
almost every idea in this post, from why memory bandwidth decides the outcome to why moving weights costs more than computing on them, comes straight out of how a GPU is built. I wrote a detailed primer on that.
the article is quoted below.
Fuck you if you hate on Elon Musk.
I’ve got nothing but two middle fingers for all of you who spend your whole day rooting for him to fail.
Bc when real life hits, a lot of the same people laughing today will end up hoping the technology he built actually works.
When someone you love is in a serious car accident, you’re going to wish cars were smart enough to prevent crashes in the first place. That’s the direction Tesla is pushing with FSD.
When someone loses the ability to move, you’re going to hope companies like Neuralink keep making progress toward helping the brain communicate with computers and potentially restoring lost function.
When powerful people want more control over what can be said on the internet and even censor it, you’re going to understand why having a platform like 𝕏 that fights for open conversation matters.
When a disaster knocks out your internet and cell service, you’re going to be thankful satellites are already above us and Starlink can bring connectivity to places traditional networks can’t reach.
And if humanity ever faces a threat big enough that Earth alone isn’t enough, you’re going to be glad somebody spent decades thinking about rockets, reusable launch systems, Starship, and making life multiplanetary.
Bro… this doesn’t mean Elon is perfect. No one is.
He says crazy shit.
He does crazy shit.
Sometimes he’s early.
Sometimes he’s wrong.
Sometimes he pisses everybody off.
But look at what he chooses to spend his life building… safer transportation, brain-computer interfaces, global internet, free speech infrastructure, energy, robotics, AI, and a path toward another planet.
You don’t have to like the man.
But spending your life hoping he fails is a fool’s game.
I’d rather bet on the person crazy enough to keep trying to solve problems most people are too afraid to even touch.
From everything I’ve seen, his heart is in the right place and his intentions are bigger than himself.
He cares.
Fable 이 훨씬 손에 익긴 하다. 더 잘 하기도 하지만, 커서를 쓰는 입장이기도 하고, 비용과 효율을 포함한다면 grok build 도 충분히 쓸 가치가 있다. 오늘까지 결론. 9월에 스위칭 될꺼야. 엔트로픽은 다음 만날 기회가 있다면 만나~! 도움 많이 받았어. 고마웠어 안뇽~!