--- title: "I tested 3 tiny local LLMs for everyday work, and only one of them impressed me" url: https://daily.dev/posts/i-tested-3-tiny-local-llms-for-everyday-work-and-only-one-of-them-impressed-me-nr7umin3k source_url: https://www.xda-developers.com/tested-tiny-local-llms-for-everyday-work-only-one-impressed-me type: article source: "XDA Developers" published: 2026-05-23T10:05:00.608Z updated: 2026-05-23T10:05:32.531Z tags: ["local-ai", "gemma", "qwen"] reading_time: 5 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # I tested 3 tiny local LLMs for everyday work, and only one of them impressed me **[XDA Developers](https://daily.dev/sources/xda-developers)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A hands-on comparison of three sub-2B local LLMs — Google's Gemma 4 E2B, Alibaba's Qwen 3.5 0.8B, and Liquid AI's LFM2.5-1.2B — tested on a structured writing task and a real-time weather query via Brave Search MCP. Qwen 3.5 0.8B hallucinated confidently and badly, Gemma 4 E2B was inconsistent with units, and LFM2.5-1.2B won the real-time tool-calling test with a clean, accurate response despite failing the creative task. The takeaway: tiny models aren't toys, they're specialists, and matching them to their intended use case matters more than raw benchmark scores. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [I tested every tiny local LLM worth running, and only three survived the cut](https://daily.dev/posts/i-tested-every-tiny-local-llm-worth-running-and-only-three-survived-the-cut-ldlh8vwq9) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [I tested 3 local LLMs on my actual work — and each model won at something different](https://daily.dev/posts/i-tested-3-local-llms-on-my-actual-work-and-each-model-won-at-something-different-d643xkwyx) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#local-ai](https://daily.dev/tags/local-ai), [#gemma](https://daily.dev/tags/gemma), [#qwen](https://daily.dev/tags/qwen) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/i-tested-3-tiny-local-llms-for-everyday-work-and-only-one-of-them-impressed-me-nr7umin3k)