Local Ai
Is there a better small model than Qwen3.5 4B for a fast local AI assistant?
I'm currently using Qwen3.5 4B as the brain of my local AI assistant because my hardware is relatively limited. One thing I really like about it is the speed. On my system, I'm getting around 40–50 to
I'm currently using Qwen3.5 4B as the brain of my local AI assistant because my hardware is relatively limited. One thing I really like about it is the speed. On my system, I'm getting around 40–50 tokens/sec, which makes the interaction feel surprisingly close to real-time. So I don't want to move to a much larger model if that means losing that responsiveness. What I'm wondering is whether there are any newer or alternative models in roughly the same size/memory/compute range that are noticeably better than Qwen3.5 4B for my particular use case. My priorities are mainly: - General-purpose conversation and communication - Natural responses and understanding - Reasoning and following instructions - Multilingual conversations and translation - Context understanding - Tool/function calling mainly for triggering actions in my assistant, rather than writing code - Reliability when interacting with tools - Ideally good performance while keeping the model fast and lightweight Essentially, I'm trying to build a local assistant where the model acts as the reasoning/conversation layer, while other tools handle things like actions, APIs, automation, etc. So my question is: If I'm already using Qwen3.5 4B and getting ~40 to 50 TPS, is there anything in a similar practical memory/compute footprint that you'd personally consider a significant upgrade for general conversation + multilingual ability + tool calling? It doesn't necessarily have to have fewer parameters. I'm more interested in overall capability relative to the amount of RAM/VRAM and compute it requires. I'm happy with Qwen3.5 4B, so I'm not looking for something that's only marginally different. I'm wondering if there's something that makes you think submitted by /u/Lordaizen639 [link] [comments]
Related
- Can a 4B local model actually feel like an AI assistant?
- Can someone point me in the right direction of what model(s) to look at for a newer user?
- Are there any experimental small models (9B or less) which are out or currently being trained using engram/n-grams?
Source: r/LocalLLaMA | 2026-09-14