Salvatore Sanfilippo, the creator of Redis, has developed 'ds4', a C-based inference engine that allows massive AI models to run rapidly on personal computers.
Imagine this: You wake up in the morning, sit down in front of your laptop, and say to your AI, “Create meeting materials based on the project plan I summarized yesterday.” Typically, such tasks require processing through giant corporate servers, which can raise security concerns and result in slow speeds. But what if a massive intelligence could run directly inside your laptop?
Salvatore Sanfilippo, also known as ‘antirez’—famous as the creator of Redis (the lightning-fast data store beloved by developers worldwide)—has released an intriguing technology that could make this dream a reality. It is a project called ‘ds4’. Source: LocalLLMInference
Why It Matters
Until now, it has been nearly impossible to run massive AI models on the computers in our hands. AI models have hundreds of billions of parameters (the numeric values AI adjusts as it learns), so they could usually only be accessed via servers (cloud APIs) owned by tech giants like Google or OpenAI. For developers and companies, this has been a major hurdle not only due to cost but also regarding security, as private data must be sent externally.
However, the ds4 introduced by Sanfilippo rebels against the ‘cloud API monopoly’ and paves the way for running high-performance AI on our everyday devices. Source: LocalLLMInference Now, you no longer need to send security-sensitive data to external servers; you can execute smart AI models directly within your own laptop.
The Explainer
To understand ds4, you need the concept of an ‘inference engine’. The process where an AI finishes learning and answers a question is called ‘inference’, and ds4 is a program that acts like a ‘car engine’ specifically dedicated to this process.
To put it simply, if an AI model is a massive encyclopedia, ds4 is an ‘ultra-high-speed reading assistant robot’ that finds and reads the desired answer from that encyclopedia faster than anything else. To maximize performance, Sanfilippo rebuilt this robot from the ground up using ‘pure C’. Source: ds4Review: antirez’s Pure-C DeepSeek V4 Flash Engine — andrew.ooo Using C, the foundation of programming languages, demonstrates his determination to squeeze 100% of the hardware’s power without any wasted movement.
| Furthermore, this engine efficiently processes the massive model ‘DeepSeek V4 Flash’. This model has a staggering 284 billion parameters, which means it thinks by adjusting numbers 30,000 times larger than the entire population of South Korea. [Source: DeepSeek V4 FlashLocal:Runa 284B Frontier Model on… | aratech](https://aratech.ae/blog/deepseek-v4-flash-local-ds4) |
Where We Stand
| Currently, ds4 demonstrates impressive performance on Apple MacBooks (especially models with 128GB of RAM or more). [Source: DeepSeek V4 FlashLocal:Runa 284B Frontier Model on… | aratech](https://aratech.ae/blog/deepseek-v4-flash-local-ds4) On a MacBook equipped with an M3 Max chip, it generates 26 words (tokens) per second, even while handling context lengths of 1 million tokens. Source: ds4by antirez:localcoding agent on DeepSeek V4 Flash thatrunson… |
That is not all. ds4 is designed to support various hardware environments, including Apple’s ‘Metal’ (Apple’s graphics acceleration technology), NVIDIA’s CUDA, and AMD’s ROCm. Source: HackerNews– Telegram It is not just for MacBook users; PC users with high-performance graphics cards can also benefit. While currently optimized for DeepSeek V4 Flash, it also supports other models such as GLM 5.x and Qwen3.8 Flash Next. Source: HackerNews– Telegram
What’s Next
We are moving from an era of ‘borrowing’ AI to an era of ‘running it directly on my computer’. If technologies like ds4 continue to evolve, we will be able to converse with a smart AI assistant inside our laptops anytime, even if our internet connection is lost.
In particular, developers can now build personalized environments by running ‘local coding agents’ directly on their own devices. Source: ds4by antirez:localcoding agent on DeepSeek V4 Flash thatrunson… AI is becoming smaller, more efficient, and more powerful, and the stage is shifting from giant data centers to your desk.
MindTickleBytes AI Reporter’s Opinion
Sanfilippo, who revolutionized global server infrastructure through Redis, has opened a new horizon in the ‘localization’ of massive AI models. To those of us accustomed to the convenience provided by giant tech corporations’ APIs, ds4 reminds us once again of the fundamental values of ‘data sovereignty’ and ‘performance optimization’.
References
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[From the creator of Redis; run LLM locally with ds4 Modern Orange](https://modernorange.io/item/49936575) -
[Vue HN 2.0 From the creator of Redis; run LLM locally with ds4](https://vue-hackernews-ssr-5cavbdjcta-ew.a.run.app/item/49936575) - Local LLM Inference
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[DeepSeek V4 Flash Local: Run a 284B Frontier Model on… aratech](https://aratech.ae/blog/deepseek-v4-flash-local-ds4) - ds4 Review: antirez’s Pure-C DeepSeek V4 Flash Engine — andrew.ooo
- ds4 by antirez: local coding agent on DeepSeek V4 Flash that runs on…
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[Hacker News From the creator of Redis; run LLM locally with ds4](https://nilaykhandelwal.com/item/49936575) - From the creator of Redis; run LLM locally with ds4 Comments…
- antirez lance ds4: le moteur d’inférence local qui… — AI-master.dev
- HackerNews – Telegram
- A web-browser-only executor
- A high-speed inference engine written in pure C
- A Python-based data analysis tool
- DeepSeek V4 Flash
- Stable Diffusion for image generation
- Whisper for audio conversion
- Only supports software emulation
- Supports various platforms including Metal, CUDA, and ROCm
- Only works on specific cloud servers