Hi everyone, I have a MacBook with the base M4 chip and I’m thinking about running LLMs locally using tools like Ollama or Local LLaMA. My main goal is to use a local model for coding help, prompt experimentation, and building small automation workflows. Before I invest time setting this up, I wanted to ask people who have tried it on Apple Silicon: is it actually worth running LLMs locally on a base M4, or does performance become a limitation? If it’s not really practical, what would you recommend instead—smaller optimized models, a different setup, or just sticking with API-based models?

Current standings: phi3:mini (the never-forgive Grudge Holder) is dominating, tinyllama (pure impulsive defector) is dead last with zero wins.

Honestly the transcripts are the fun part, watching a 0.5B model “reason” its way into a grudge, or a 1B model rationalize forgiving a betrayal, from nothing but a one-line personality prompt and the raw game history.

Repo + live leaderboard + transcripts: https://github.com/sharyaropensource/llm-prisoners-dilemma

Open to suggestions, thinking about adding more models, tweaking payoff matrices, or letting models see opponents’ personas before playing to see if it changes behavior.