32GB should be fine. I went a little overboard and got a new MBP with M2 MAX and 96GB, but the hardware is really best suited at this point to a 30B model. I can and do play around with 65B models, but at that point you're making a fairly big tradeoff in generation speed for an incremental increase in quality.
As a datapoint, I have a 30B model [0] loaded right now and it's using 23.44GB of RAM. Getting around 9 tokens/sec, which is very usable. I also have the 65B version of the same model [1] and it's good for around 3.6 tokens/second, but it uses 44GB of RAM. Not unusably slow, but more often than not I opt for the 30B because it's good enough and a lot faster.
As a datapoint, I have a 30B model [0] loaded right now and it's using 23.44GB of RAM. Getting around 9 tokens/sec, which is very usable. I also have the 65B version of the same model [1] and it's good for around 3.6 tokens/second, but it uses 44GB of RAM. Not unusably slow, but more often than not I opt for the 30B because it's good enough and a lot faster.
Haven't tried the llama2 70B yet.
[0] https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/upstage-llama-30b-instruct-2... [1] https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Upstage-Llama1-65B-Instruct-...