Hey :) For a while now I use gpt-oss-20b on my home lab for lightweight coding tasks and some automation. I’m not so up to date with the current self-hosted LLMs and since the model I’m using was released at the beginning of August 2025 (From an LLM development perspective, it feels like an eternity to me) I just wanted to use the collective wisdom of lemmy to maybe replace my model with something better out there.
Edit:
Specs:
GPU: RTX 3060 (12GB vRAM)
RAM: 64 GB
gpt-oss-20b does not fit into the vRAM completely but it partially offloaded and is reasonably fast (enough for me)
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I suggest looking at llm arena leaderboards filtered by open weight models. It offers benchmarks at a very complete and statistically detailed level for models, and usually is quite up to date when new models come out. The new Gemma that just came out might be the best for 1x GPU, and if you have a bunch of vram check out the larger Chinese models
Just curious, what does “some automation” entail? I thought LLMs could only work with text, like summarize documents and that sort of thing.
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That’s cool, it just… does those things? How does it connect to those apps? I can’t even get Gemini to set a reminder and that’s on a Google device.
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That was actually super helpful, thank you.
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It’s done by software using an LLM, not just a raw LLM. They do only work with text, but you can get it to output the text “get_weather(mylocation)”, and instead of just outputting that directly to the user, the software running on top of the LLM runs a " get_weather" function that calls some weather API. The result of that function is then output to the user.
Any time you see an “AI” taking “actions”, this is what happens in the background for every action.
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I also recommend gemma4 or qwen3.5. Both super solid in my experience for how lightweight they are
Still can’t get my gemma to give me complete unbuggy components
I guess I have been using gemma4 fro more role playing games. Qwen3.5 seems to be better coder actually
Have you tried the new gemma4 models? The e4b fits in the 12gb memory and is pretty good. Or you can use 31b too, if you’re okay with offloading to CPU.
