Can I run Mistral Nemo 12B?

Mistral Nemo 12B is the model you reach for when an 8B feels a little thin but you still want something that fits one consumer GPU. It is a 12.2B dense chat model from Mistral AI, and at a 4-bit quant it lands around 7.4 GB, which slots neatly onto a 12 GB card like an RTX 3060 with room left for context. The minimum to load it sits near 12 GB of RAM, so it is comfortable on an Apple Silicon Mac with 16 GB or more, and it will limp along on CPU if you have nothing else.

Day to day it feels like a well-mannered general assistant: steady for chat, summarising, and rewriting, without the occasional flakiness you get from smaller models. On an RTX 3060 you can expect roughly 41 tokens per second at 4-bit, and an M-series Max pushes that to about 47, both faster than you read. The 128K context window is genuine, but it is not free: fill it completely and total memory climbs to around 27.7 GB, well past what a single 12 GB card holds, so keep working context modest unless you have a 24 GB GPU or plenty of unified memory.

Against its neighbours, Mistral Small 3.1 24B generally has the edge on harder reasoning and adds vision, while Gemma 3 12B is the similarly-sized alternative if you want image input that Nemo does not offer. Nemo's standout trait is its sweet spot: a chat-focused 12B that stays on one mainstream GPU and ships under Apache 2.0, so you can use it commercially and in production with no strings attached. If you want a capable text assistant that just works locally and never raises a licensing question, this is an easy pick.