Although I'm interested in both topics (KV compression and attempts to stream MoE models from storage) this is at least the 10th vibecoded project on this topic I've seen today alone across HN, Twitter, and some subreddits I visit.

At least this one gave credit to the upstream projects which it used as a reference.

The llama.cpp project is also getting a wave of vibecoded PRs that are very clearly being produced by pointing claude at the repo and the original paper and having it produce something.

Almost none of these attempts contain information that really matters, like actual benchmark tests with differen KV quantization levels (not just perplexity or KLD).

Feels 100% vibe coded in a bad way.

Llama.cpp already has KV compression and one of the turbo quant PRs will get merged at some point.

If you don’t care about the fancy 3 bit, the q8 KV compression is good enough! Don’t bother with q4

./build/bin/llama-server -m model.gguf \ --cache-type-k q8_0 \ --cache-type-v q8_0 \ -c 65536

Etc

I couldn't get the downloadable binary to work, or the binary I compiled myself:

  ./SwiftLM \
    --model mlx-community/Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-4bit \
    --stream-experts \
    --port 5413

  [SwiftLM] Loading model: mlx-community/Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-4bit
  [SwiftLM] Enabled Async SSD Streaming on directory: e9c67b08899964be5fdd069bb1b4bc8907fe68f5
  [SwiftLM]  Memory strategy: FULL GPU (69.6GB model, 133.4GB available)
  [SwiftLM] Download: [===================>] 100% ⠋ (66395.4 MB / 66395.4 MB) | Speed: 0.0 MB/s      
  MLX error: Failed to load the default metallib. library not found library not found library not found library not found  at /Users/runner/work/SwiftLM/SwiftLM/LocalPackages/mlx-swift/Source/Cmlx/mlx-c/mlx/c/stream.cpp:115

We implemented two techniques to run massive 100B+ parameter MoE models natively on the M5 Pro 64GB MacBook Pro:

TurboQuant KV compression: We ported the V3 Lloyd-Max codebooks from the TurboQuant paper (Zandieh et al., ICLR 2026) into native C++ and fused dequantization into Metal shaders. This achieves a measured 4.3× KV cache compression at runtime, completely eliminating Python overhead.

SSD Expert Streaming: To fit a 122B parameter model (e.g., Qwen3.5-122B MoE) without triggering macOS VM swapping or Watchdog kernel kills, the full ~60 GB weight file remains on NVMe. Only the top-k active expert pages are streamed to the GPU per forward pass at ~9 GB/s. As a result, inference runs with only 2,694 MB of active GPU VRAM on the M5 Pro 64GB, while the OS page cache automatically handles hot-expert reuse.

By combining these two approaches, we can comfortably run massive models in memory-constrained environments on Apple Silicon.

Also tested QWEN 4B on IPHONE 13 Pro.

Code and implementation details: https://github.com/SharpAI/SwiftLM

Anyone else looking at these developments and thinking that local llms are the future. So many advantages above remote, and the hardware is just not there jet, but another leap like apple silicon and the tech is there..

Ofcourse large corps will have fancy proprietary models, but for every day queries and tasks, local feels like a huge, and just slightly out of reach.

Am i missing something fundamental?

I like this idea on expert streaming. I've been poking around fairly thoroughly at the same idea - can we fix a set of experts? when can we fix them? How long is the top-k selection "good" for in terms of number of forward passes?

One thing I've turned up in smaller models and I'm sort of winding my way toward verifying in larger ones is that if you train the MoE model from scratch with this kind of knockout / subset of experts baked in, then you get significantly better loss outcomes. In small models, it's actually better than training an MOE without conditioning on a reduced set of experts per pass.

Anyway, pretty cool. There's some Pareto-optimal curve based on memory bandwidth, amount of GPU / unified RAM and inference compute times for streaming stuff in.

Does this use anything from the flash-moe project?

https://github.com/Alexintosh/flash-moe

Can this work on M1, M2, M3, M4?

Another project without running real benchmarks. It's very easy to generate tokens, it's much harder to solve tasks locally.