if you want to be lazy, 7b = 7gb of vRAM, 12b = 12gb of vRAM, but quantizing you might be able to do with with ~6-8. So any 16gb Macbook could run it (but not much else).
no, it is basically an 'auto-correct' spell checker from the phone. It only knows what it was trained on. But it has been shown that a coding LLM that has never seen a programming language or a library can "learn" a new one faster than, say, a generic LLM.
For me, personally, Copilot is the best because you are typing and it is just suggesting. Very often I type something, wait 2 seconds for its answer (knowing it is going to get it right 80% of the time) and press tab. Sure, it misses a ton, but I see it as a great autocorrect that is always there trying to help. Now, copilot chat and everything else are very bad. I don't like them.
If you are "intentional" I usually just use ChatGPT-4 directly. I've had a super pleasant experience with Cursor, too. You can just open Cursor and say "write readme for me", it will scan your project and right a decent readme. It is also eeeeextremely goooood at "I need to know where in the codebase is doing this" and it finds. But for day to day I still prefer chatgpt 4.
So I would say:
- If you want a nice autocorrect, copilot
- If you want something that knows your project and tries to help, cursor
- If you just want something smart, chatgpt with gpt-4.
I would say copilot lets me be 15% faster daily, and gpt-4 about 30% faster (when I need it), but I need it less often - maybe twice per day.
even if that's true, the A series neural engine is much worse than the M series, I'll say it wrong, but it can only do 32bit inference (or something like that) where M series can do 64bit, so A series can run LLM but has a series of limitations that M series doesn't.