5 Open-Source AI Models Actually Worth Running on Your M5 Mac in 2026
The five open-source AI models worth running on an M5 Mac in April 2026 are Mistral 7B (16 GB), Qwen 3.5 9B (24 GB), DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B (24 GB), Gemma 4 26B-A4B (32 GB), and Qwen 3.5 35B-A3B (32 GB+). Minimum unified memory is 16 GB, the sweet spot is 24 GB, and anything above 30B parameters needs 32 GB or more. Frontier open-source models like GLM 5.2 or the full DeepSeek R1 need hundreds of GBs of VRAM, so skip those entirely. The five below are what actually fits. All five picks are examples of open source AI, models whose weights are published openly so you can […]
