Redis creator releases ds4 for local AI on MacBooks
DwarfStar, or ds4, is a local engine released on GitHub on May 7, 2026 by Salvatore Sanfilippo, the creator of Redis. It is written in C and built for one specific model: . That model has 284 billion total parameters, with 13 billion active during use, and uses a design.
On machines with a lot of memory, ds4 also supports a PRO version with 1.6 trillion total parameters and about 49 billion . ds4 is not a general Ollama replacement or a wrapper for GGUF files. It is a purpose-built engine meant to run one model as efficiently as possible on consumer hardware.
Its main target is , with support for NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm. The normal memory target is 96GB, but SSD streaming can lower that target to 64GB.
Key points
- ds4 is a local engine from Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo.
- It focuses on running efficiently on personal hardware.
- It is not a general Ollama replacement or a broad GGUF wrapper.
- It targets first, with NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm support.
- It aims for 96GB of memory, or 64GB when using SSD streaming.