ds4

DwarfStar (the repo is still named ds4) is antirez's local inference engine for running a short list of big open models on hardware you own. The creator of Redis built it first for DeepSeek V4 Flash, and it now also runs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, V4 PRO, the GLM 5.x family, and Qwen3.8 Flash Next on Metal, behind an OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible server. It only loads the GGUF files the project itself produces. MIT, free.

The price is hardware, not software. Macs with 96 GB or more are the primary target, and smaller machines can stream weights off SSD. On Linux it runs on CUDA, including older Ada Lovelace cards like the L40S, plus DGX Spark and Strix Halo boxes. Setup is a download script and make. Weight files run to hundreds of gigabytes, so budget a big, fast SSD too.

Beyond the chat CLI it ships ds4-agent, a built-in coding agent, plus image input, disk KV caching and inference split across machines. A solo developer with a loaded Mac Studio gets a near-frontier model with nobody else in the loop. Everyone else should stay on llama.cpp or vLLM until they own the metal.

The catch is churn. antirez calls it beta quality, warns that regressions are possible and that models get dropped when better ones arrive, and says openly it was built with strong help from AI coding agents. Run it to own your inference stack, not to ship a product on it.