What was delivered
- Strata with the Gyro-S build of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next 125B (58.5 GB, plus a 24 GB copy of its experts prepared for the SSD), installed in its own folder without touching oMLX. Measured on 27 October 2026.
- Why 24 GB is enough: the model is 24,576 small experts and each word calls only 10 of the 512 in every layer. The parts used for every word and the busiest experts stay in memory; the rest are read from the SSD at 5–6 GB a second when a word needs them. Holding it all in memory would take a 48 GB Mac.
- Speed: about 8.3 tokens a second, the same with an 8K or a 32K window. Long prompts read at about 225 tokens a second, so a 30,000-token prompt waits about 2 minutes for the first word; a codeword hidden in a real code base was found every time.
- Ten questions, thinking on, same settings and judge as before: 96 / 100, ahead of Bonsai 2 (85) and the 9B Distill (80). It solved the rope puzzle and wrote a tic-tac-toe program that played 581 games without losing. With thinking off it scored 76.
- Connect Four: its AI scored 94.4 in the coding contest (rules and tactics perfect), beating Bonsai 7–1 in the round robin. Playing live against the win-or-block bot, it won 1 and lost 1; Bonsai lost both of those games.
Problems and fixes
- Setup crashed with KeyError: 146: a size table in Strata's code was missing the expert format this model uses. Fix: Claude added the one missing line, matching the values defined elsewhere in Strata.
- The safety check wouldn't let Claude run Strata's installer and start script, third-party code from the internet. Fix: I ran those two in Terminal; Claude did everything else.
- 24 GB can't hold the model, so memory is tight: the SSD reads 5–5.9 GB a second the whole time and swap reached 12–18 GB. Fix: stop oMLX and ComfyUI first; nothing froze.
- Slow with thinking on: 40 minutes for the ten questions (Bonsai: 11), and the Connect Four AI ran out of tokens mid-code. Fix: the thinking-off version (8 minutes) was entered.
Why it matters
A model five times bigger than the memory runs on a desk computer, and it gives the best answers of anything tested here. It is too slow for everyday chat, which stays on the 9B Distill, but for hard reasoning or code where being right matters more than waiting, a 125B model is now available offline on a Mac mini.