A pair of 9 and 11 year old boys made a similar trip going from Needham MA, to the World’s Fair in Montreal. They did it with a pony/pony-cart in 1967. PBS did a really nice short documentary on them where they're interviewed.
I was/am a fan of z.ai’s GLM models as a drop in replacement for Claude. But they more than doubled their prices recently. Still a ok alternative, but not really an amazing deal anymore.
I've tried out gpt-oss:20b on a MacBook Air (via Ollama) with 24GB of RAM. In my experience it's output is comparable to what you'd get out of older models and the openAI benchmarks seem accurate https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/ . Definitely a usable speed. Not instant, but ~5 tokens per second of output if I had to guess.
https://www.vermontpublic.org/show/made-here/2024-09-05/pony...