ds4

DwarfStar (the repo is still named ds4) is antirez's local inference engine for running one open model family at a time on serious hardware. Right now that is DeepSeek V4, both the smaller Flash weights and the larger PRO. It is not a generic GGUF runner; the creator of Redis built it to run a frontier-class model on your own machine behind an OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible server. MIT, free.

The price here is the hardware, not the software. The floor is a 96GB Mac on Metal, and the PRO weights want much more; on Linux it runs on CUDA, DGX Spark, and Strix Halo (ROCm) boxes like the Framework Desktop. It now streams models larger than RAM off SSD, caches KV state to disk, and can split inference across multiple machines. Setup is a download script and a make, then a CLI with think and no-think modes plus that drop-in API server.

For a solo developer with a loaded Mac Studio, this is a genuinely cool way to run a frontier model with full sovereignty over it. For everyone else, it asks for hardware most people do not have, so llama.cpp or vLLM stays the practical path until you own the metal.

The catch is that this is alpha, by antirez's own admission, leaning heavily on AI assistance and openly indebted to llama.cpp. One model family, no production claims, breaking changes expected. Run it to learn and to own your inference stack, not to ship a product on top of.