BEST local LLMs to run in 2026:

High-performance (24+ GB VRAM, preferably with multiple GPUs)

• Kimi K2 - 1T params, 32B active. MoE beast

• GLM-4.7 (Z AI) - 30B-A3B MoE, SWE-bench 73.8%

• DeepSeek V3.2 - 671B / 37B active. Still the open-source king

• Qwen3 235B-A22B - insane quality/cost ratio if you have the iron

Mid-range (16-24 GB VRAM / RAM)

• Qwen3 30B-A3B - punches way above its weight, stable on long context

• Gemma 3 27B - Google's best open release yet

• Nemotron 3 Nano 30B - Math500: 91%. Best-in-class if you need math

Lightweight models (8-16 GB RAM, can run without a dedicated GPU)

• Qwen3 8B / 4B / 1.7B - the best small model family right now

• Gemma 3 4B - surprisingly capable on CPU

• Phi-4 (14B) - Microsoft doing a lot with a little

The local AI stack is genuinely catching up to the cloud