OpenClaw
I could write a ton here. But short story - you should run openclaw. You can take a look at my old ChatGPT page, I've been interested in this for at least 3 years, and I try to keep close enough to the edge but not bleeding on it.
Hardware
I was super fortunate to be scouring eBay for used Mac Studio M2 Ultras in late 2025. I lucked out amazingly and picked up a 192GB RAM / 1TB M2 Ultra for $4,200. Less than a year later, these machines are more than double the cost. I could sell it, but then I'd only have my M2 Max Macbook Pro 64GB.
Models
My daily driver is the Qwen 3.5 122B A10B monster. Trounces OSS-120b, along with most other models up to 140B params. For smaller tasks, the Qwen 3.6 35B A3B does a truly fantastic job, and the dense Qwen 3.6 27B is really pretty solid for coding. But the Gemma 4 series also shines. But I rarely turn to them, since the 122A10 does a great job, and I'm not in such a rush that I cannot wait an extra 10 seconds for the prompt to process and tokens to start generating.
I also run a few purpose-built LLMs for specific cases - MedQwen, DrSamantha, SauLLM. That's medical, mental, and legal concerns.
Running LLMs
Right now I'm still using LM Studio, but I'm considering going to pure llama.cpp since I hear there are some reasons to do that.
What For?
There is a MacOS companion app. There will very soon be an iOS app. There is an Android app already. That means remote access to your screen, your camera, location, speakers, mic. The companion app does full real-time conversation mode with whisper mlx. Also push-to-talk if you prefer. And then responds either in text or audio. The iOS app will do the same. That alone sets it ahead.
I run opencode, and one day, openclaw will manage it indirectly for me.
It is bound to Slack, I can converse with OpenClaw anytime.
I have it do research, run tasks, soon to be an email manager (for all my non-primary emails, where it will just forward to me summaries or key info to my primary email).
I wanted to start using Trillium Notes. There was no skill, but there was an MCP server. I told OpenClaw about it, generated a key, pointed it to the docs, and it wrote it's own skill. Now I can use the skill to use my voice to create and manage entries in my notes DB.
Setup
I wrote about in github here: tolidano/ai
Others
I would be remiss not to mention Hermes, or even Odysseus, the recent release from PewDiePie. They are both interesting, and have their uses.