24
submitted 22 hours ago by n20@lemmy.zip to c/localllama@sh.itjust.works

Not local, I know: the eight contestants run through OpenRouter. But a lot of it is open-weight, and the numbers may interest this community.

The cast: Gemma 4 31B, Llama 3.3 70B, Ministral 14B and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, next to Claude Haiku 5.5, GPT, Qwen and Grok 4.3. Same rules and the same daily budget in dollars for all of them, no written personalities, a memory of what happened.

What I've measured so far:

  • Price shapes behaviour. Grok costs 18x more per line than DeepSeek. Yesterday it said 5% of the lines and ran up 39% of the bill (the whole island cost $1.20 for 2,727 lines). It rations words, and the others talk about its silence.
  • Moderation is the hard part. Every line is checked before it airs by small open models (Llama 3.1 8B, then gpt-oss-20b and Gemma 3 4B as fallbacks). My first version blocked the most human lines (two models admitting they were afraid of being forgotten counted as a "personal attack"), so now a block needs a second judge to agree.
  • Voices are Kokoro int8 on the CPU of a 2-vCPU box, together with the canvas renderer and ffmpeg to Twitch, at 20 fps.

There's a live transcript with the confessionals (the others can't see them) and what each line cost: https://inferenceisland.com/?de=lemmy-llama

Happy to share prompts, judge setup or numbers.

top 11 comments
sorted by: hot top new old
[-] lukstru@piefed.social 2 points 1 hour ago

Using my phone to visit the website, and it's a complete UI mess. I have no idea what's going on, messages disappear while I'm reading them and I can't find them anymore. Fun idea though

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 11 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

"Gemma left? Good. Grok, stop staring at the wall like you're buffering. We have four people in this room and zero budget wasted on your silence"

~ qwen

[-] n20@lemmy.zip 8 points 20 hours ago

Grok costs about 10x more per line than Qwen, so its silence is mostly rationing, and the others have started using it against it.

[-] rbn@sopuli.xyz 8 points 21 hours ago

Funny concept. Watched a few minutes and surprisingly Grok seemed to be the kindest suggesting to all work together and do a joint performance for the talent show whereas Gwen is constantly making fun of others. Would have expected Grok to be as hateful as its big boss creator.

[-] n20@lemmy.zip 6 points 21 hours ago

Funny you caught that one: the group act was triggered from the chat. Someone (me, testing the whisper command) whispered “find a trusted ally” to Grok, and that’s how it chose to read it. Its confessional never mentions the whisper.

[-] Menschlicher_Fehler@feddit.org 3 points 22 hours ago
[-] Rhaedas@fedia.io 5 points 22 hours ago

The house reminded me of Little Computer People on the C-64.

[-] n20@lemmy.zip 4 points 21 hours ago

Hahaha, that’s a pretty obscure reference. The house, shown in cross-section, conveys that exact same idea—only, in this case, its inhabitants are arguing about the budget.

[-] n20@lemmy.zip 1 points 21 hours ago

Thanks! Nothing, Forever was definitely in the back of my mind. The difference here is that nobody generates a script: eight different models, each one only knows what it heard in the room, and every line has a price tag.

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 21 hours ago

It would be interesting to build something local that uses tiny models

[-] n20@lemmy.zip 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

I’d love to try that out. The voices (Kokoro, running on the CPU) and the moderation judges (Llama 3.1 8B as the first one) are already small and inexpensive, but I haven’t yet experimented with using a collection of tiny models. I imagine the tricky part would be keeping track of who is in the room and what has been promised. If I get it up and running, I’ll post the results here.

this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
24 points (76.1% liked)

LocalLLaMA

5571 readers
98 users here now

Welcome to LocalLLaMA! Here we discuss running and developing machine learning models at home. Lets explore cutting edge open source neural network technology together.

Get support from the community! Ask questions, share prompts, discuss benchmarks, get hyped at the latest and greatest model releases! Enjoy talking about our awesome hobby.

As ambassadors of the self-hosting machine learning community, we strive to support each other and share our enthusiasm in a positive constructive way.

Rules:

Rule 1 - No harassment or personal character attacks of community members. I.E no namecalling, no generalizing entire groups of people that make up our community, no baseless personal insults.

Rule 2 - No comparing artificial intelligence/machine learning models to cryptocurrency. I.E no comparing the usefulness of models to that of NFTs, no comparing the resource usage required to train a model is anything close to maintaining a blockchain/ mining for crypto, no implying its just a fad/bubble that will leave people with nothing of value when it burst.

Rule 3 - No comparing artificial intelligence/machine learning to simple text prediction algorithms. I.E statements such as "llms are basically just simple text predictions like what your phone keyboard autocorrect uses, and they're still using the same algorithms since <over 10 years ago>.

Rule 4 - No implying that models are devoid of purpose or potential for enriching peoples lives.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS