AI models like Claude Opus and ChatGPT 5.6 are called "frontier" (i.e. top of the line). There are several fully open source frontier level AI models that are available to download for free. I ran the specs on what it would take to run a frontier level model.

For inference of a frontier model (400B-1T+ params):

• Minimum (4-bit quantized): ~200-500GB VRAM → 4-8× H100 80GB GPUs
• FP16/half precision: ~800GB-2TB VRAM → 10-32× H100 80GB GPUs
• System RAM: 512GB+
• Interconnect: NVLink or InfiniBand between GPUs
• Storage: Several hundred GB for model weights For training: 10,000-100,000+ GPU-hours on H100-class hardware, multi-million dollar cluster, weeks of continuous run time. No single consumer GPU can run a frontier model — even an RTX 4090 (24GB) is about 10-30× short of VRAM needed for even a heavily quantized frontier model.

If you just want to host a "good" AI model it requires 8x GPUs with 80GB of VRAM each.

It's about $300k to get in the door for a SINGLE server to run AI you can ask questions