Can I run h2o-lightning-4b on a Mac with 16 GB?

Yes, just

Its published weights (9.32 GB) fit in the 10.7 GB a Mac with 16 GB can use, with room for ≈ 39K tokens of context.

Full analysis of h2o-lightning-4b Everything that runs on Mac with 16 GB Get the weights on Hugging Face

hf download h2oai/h2o-lightning-4b

Files and context on Mac with 16 GB

Each file of h2o-lightning-4b (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 16 GB	Context (16-bit)	Context (8-bit)
As published	9.32 GB	Tight	39K	77K
4-bit (estimate)	2.62 GB	Fits	238K	256K

h2o-lightning-4b on other hardware

NVIDIA H100Yes
RTX 5090Yes
RTX 4090Yes
RTX 3090Yes
RTX 5060 Ti 16 GBYes
RTX 3060 12 GBYes, just
RTX 4060Probably, at 4-bit
Mac with 16 GBYes, just
Mac with 32 GBYes
Mac with 64 GBYes
Mac with 128 GBYes

Popular models that run on Mac with 16 GB

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Qwen2.5-0.5B-InstructQwen · 494M
Qwen2.5-1.5B-InstructQwen · 1.54B
Qwen3-4BQwen · 4.02B
Qwen3.5-4BQwen · 4.66B
Ornith-1.5-9B-GGUFornith-ai · 9.20B

Assumes 67% 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.