Verge writer tests local AI agents with Hermes and Qwen on M5 Ultra Mac Studio

The Verge writer Antonio G. Di Benedetto installed the open-source Hermes Agent desktop app and the 125-billion-parameter Qwen 3.8 Flash Next model, about 105GB in size, on an M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB of unified memory, and is running local LLM tasks including a daily Telegram briefing, reorganizing a 400-plus-game Steam library, and local data analysis. He is now working on automating laptop benchmark tests. Di Benedetto said the setup is completely free to use if you stick to local LLMs, but a local AI needs permissions over the machine to take actions: for the game library he had to register a Steam web API key and give it to Hermes. The daily briefing kept failing to generate at first until he figured out that macOS could not be asleep when the job fired at 7:30am.

Generated by AI from reports · Updated 6 days ago