Can I run GLiDE on a Mac with 256 GB?

Yes

Its published weights (52.2 GB) fit in the 192 GB a Mac with 256 GB can use, with room for ≈ 256K tokens of context.

Full analysis of GLiDE Everything that runs on Mac with 256 GB Get the weights on Hugging Face

hf download fastino/GLiDE

Files and context on Mac with 256 GB

Each file of GLiDE (and of GGUF versions the site has analyzed), and how much context fits next to it, with the context cache in 16-bit or 8-bit.

File	Size	On Mac with 256 GB	Context (16-bit)	Context (8-bit)
As published	52.2 GB	Fits	256K	256K
4-bit (estimate)	14.7 GB	Fits	256K	256K

GLiDE on other hardware

NVIDIA H100Yes
RTX 5090Probably, at 4-bit
RTX 4090Probably, at 4-bit
RTX 3090Probably, at 4-bit
RTX 5060 Ti 16 GBNo
RTX 3060 12 GBNo
RTX 4060No
Mac with 32 GBProbably, at 4-bit
Mac with 64 GBProbably, at 4-bit
Mac with 128 GBYes
Mac with 256 GBYes

Popular models that run on Mac with 256 GB

Qwen3-0.6BQwen · 752M
Qwen3-VL-8B-InstructQwen · 8.77B
gpt2openai-community · 137M
Qwen3-8BQwen · 8.19B
Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUFunsloth · 30.5B
gemma-4-26B-A4B-itgoogle · 25.8B
Qwen2.5-7B-InstructQwen · 7.62B
Qwen3.5-9BQwen · 9.65B

Assumes 75% of the Mac's memory is usable (macOS's default limit for the GPU; it can be raised) and at least 4K tokens of context for one conversation, with the context cache in 16-bit unless noted. Fits leaves at least 20% of that memory for context; Tight leaves less.