Local AI Cluster · Visual Course

Local AI Cluster on Mac M5 Max

Hands-on course to build and operate a private AI cluster on a Mac M5 Max 128 GB, using MLX, open-source models and smart orchestration to cut cloud costs.

Start →Lesson 1 · What Is the Local AI Cluster?

Module 1 · Fundamentals

Lesson 1

What Is the Local AI Cluster?

Learn why a Mac M5 Max 128 GB becomes a private, fast, multilingual AI pre-processor.

Lesson 2

Hardware and the MLX Engine

See how Apple Unified Memory and MLX turn the Mac into a local inference accelerator.

Module 2 · Models

Lesson 3

Text Models and Quantization

Compare Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, DeepSeek-V4-Flash and learn to read quantizations like Q4_K_M, UD-IQ3_XXS and 8-bit.

Lesson 4

Vision, Audio and Multimodal

Use mlx-vlm for images/documents and mlx-audio for STT/TTS without leaving the Mac.

Module 3 · Agentic Workflows

Lesson 8

Agentic Engineering on the Local Cluster

Treat the local cluster as a preprocessing factory that prepares briefs for Frontier models.

Lesson 9

Fusion, Orchestration, and Frontier Gateway

Combine /opinion, /fusion and /auto-validate into a 3-tier agent architecture.

Module 4 · Applications

Lesson 5

RAG and Agent Orchestration

Build a local search pipeline with embeddings and orchestrate agents with sidekick/fusion.

Module 5 · Practice

Lesson 6

Running the Cluster in Practice

Install the tools, start the servers and wire everything through Open WebUI.

Module 6 · Conclusion

Lesson 7

Recommended Architecture and Handoff

Close the project: final reference stack, delivery checklist and next steps.