Free Drex Max AI Runs On Your Mac And Outscores Claude Haiku At Decisions

Nace AI has given away Drex Max, a free AI model that picks answers instead of writing them, and it runs fully on Apple M4 and M5 Macs with 24GB of memory or more, so a business can sort tickets and files without sending them to the cloud.

Key Takeaways

Nace AI released Drex Max, a 27 billion parameter model, as free open weights
It reads a document and a question, then gives a probability for every possible answer without writing any text
A 14.45GB version runs on Apple silicon Macs with 24GB of memory or more
Nace says it scores 64 on the Artificial Analysis Decision Index, ahead of Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low) at 61

The company announced the release on X on Oct 30, saying Drex Max “runs 100% locally on Apple Silicon (M4 & M5).” The model and its full spec sheet are on Hugging Face.

What Drex Max Actually Does

Most chatbots write an answer one word at a time. Drex Max does not write at all.

You hand it some context, such as a customer email, plus a question with a fixed list of options. It sends back a score for every option in a single step.

Nace gives a simple example. A customer writes in saying they were charged twice for one order. Asked whether billing, technical or “other” should handle it, the model gave billing a 99.88% chance.

It can weigh up to 255 options per question and read plain text, structured data and images. That makes it a fit for the dull but costly jobs inside AI systems, like routing tickets, flagging risky content or choosing which tool to use next.

Running It On A Mac

The full model takes about 49GB and is built for Nvidia graphics chips. For Macs, Nace made a smaller 4-bit version, a 14.45GB download that runs on Apple silicon machines with 24GB of memory or more.

There is a catch. The Mac version reads text only, so the image features stay on the larger setup. A bigger 8-bit file also runs on Macs but needs 48GB of memory.

Nace says it tested the small version on an M5 Pro Mac with 48GB on Oct 30. Its scores moved by no more than 0.0329 compared with the bigger file, and none of the final picks changed.

How It Stacks Up

Nace lists these scores from the Artificial Analysis Decision Index, which tests how well models pick correct answers. Drex Max ranks fourth of 18, one point behind the leaders.

Model	Type	Score
dl-ultra	Decision	65
SubQ Snap 1.1	Decision	65
Elephant 9B	Decision	65
Drex Max	Decision	64
Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low)	Language	61
Drex 2.0	Decision	58
GPT-6 Luna (Low)	Language	55

On its own Decision Index 0.4, Nace says Drex Max scored 67.52, up from 61.25 for its older Drex v2.0. These figures come from the company, and no outside group has published its own tests of the Mac version yet.

Why It Could Cut AI Bills

AI agents make lots of small choices: which document to read, which tool to call, whether to stop. When each choice goes through a paid cloud service, the costs add up fast.

A free model that makes those calls on a Mac could take a share of that work off the bill and keep private files on the machine. Nace has not published any cost savings figures, so the real gain will depend on the job.

The model comes under Nace’s own Open RAIL-M license, which lets people use it for free but sets rules on how it can be used.

What To Watch Next

The test now is whether outside developers get the same results on everyday Macs with messy real-world files. If they do, small local models like this could become a standard first step in AI tools, with the cloud saved for the heavy work.