GoKawiilWASTE — Weight-Aware Streaming Tensor Engine
Kimi K3 — 2.78 trillion parameters — running on a consumer laptop.
$ waste run ~/models/k3.waste 'What is the capital of Italy?' waste: no --budget, using 46.24 GB of 64.00 GB (expert cache 17.56 GB) The capital of Italy is **Rome**. [16 tokens, 31.09 s, 0.51 tok/s | experts 3357 hit / 20195 miss = 14%]
WASTE is an embeddable inference engine written in C, with no third-party runtime dependencies. It keeps the model trunk in memory, streams selected experts directly from disk, and uses the remaining RAM as a bounded expert cache.
Its current proof point is the complete open-weights Kimi K3 model: 2.78 trillion parameters, converted into a 982 GiB container and running on a 64 GB MacBook Pro at 0.49–0.54 tokens per second. This is not a distilled, pruned, or reduced variant.
Model Container Minimum RAM Tested speed Kimi K3 2.78T 982 GiB 29.05 GiB 0.49–0.54 tok/s Kimi-Linear 48B 19 GiB 1.87 GiB 10.7 tok/s
WASTE was written for that one model and that one constraint: K3 does not fit in the RAM of current mainstream consumer systems. It is 1.42 TB as published and 982 GB after conversion. But a mixture of experts activates about 4% of itself per token, so almost all of that weight is idle at any instant — and idle weight does not need to be in memory, it needs to be reachable in time. WASTE keeps it on disk in a layout where one expert costs exactly one read, streams what each token actually needs, and spends every remaining byte of RAM on the part that repeats.
Where this stands
The engine is correct: every layer is validated against a PyTorch reference, the final logits agree to 3.6e-06, and the vision tower matches its own oracle to 2.3e-06. It is also slow — half a token per second, thirty seconds for the sentence above.
Both of those matter, and the second one should not be read as a disclaimer. We are not aware of another published demonstration of a model this size streaming from disk on a consumer machine: we found none for trillion-scale NVMe streaming, and the best-documented 671B-class recipes assume a server with a terabyte of DDR5. That is a report of what our search turned up rather than a survey — this repository carries no bibliography and no comparison table, so read it as an invitation to send a counter-example, not as a result. The interesting part is not the speed, it is that the whole thing is in the reachable range on a single consumer machine — and that from here the question is engineering rather than feasibility.
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