I technically got an LLM running locally on a 1998 iMac G3 with 32 MB of RAM
r/LocalLLaMA
•
Generative AI
NLP
Open Source AI
Hardware: • Stock iMac G3 Re B (October 1998). 233 MHz PowerPC 750, 32 MB RAM, Mac OS 8.5. No upgrades. • Model: Andrej Karpathy’s 260K TinyStories (Llama 2 architecture). ~1 MB checkpoint. Toolchain: • Cross-compiled from a Mac mini using Retro68 (GCC for classic Mac OS → PEF binaries) • Endian-swapped model + tokenizer from little-endian to big-endian for PowerPC • Files transferred via FTP to the iMac over Ethernet Challenges: • Mac OS 8.5 gives apps a tiny memory partition by default.