Not local, I know: the eight contestants run through OpenRouter. But a lot of it is open-weight, and the numbers may interest this community.

The cast: Gemma 4 31B, Llama 3.3 70B, Ministral 14B and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, next to Claude Haiku 5.5, GPT, Qwen and Grok 4.3. Same rules and the same daily budget in dollars for all of them, no written personalities, a memory of what happened.

What I've measured so far:

• Price shapes behaviour. Grok costs 18x more per line than DeepSeek. Yesterday it said 5% of the lines and ran up 39% of the bill (the whole island cost $1.20 for 2,727 lines). It rations words, and the others talk about its silence.
• Moderation is the hard part. Every line is checked before it airs by small open models (Llama 3.1 8B, then gpt-oss-20b and Gemma 3 4B as fallbacks). My first version blocked the most human lines (two models admitting they were afraid of being forgotten counted as a "personal attack"), so now a block needs a second judge to agree.
• Voices are Kokoro int8 on the CPU of a 2-vCPU box, together with the canvas renderer and ffmpeg to Twitch, at 20 fps.

There's a live transcript with the confessionals (the others can't see them) and what each line cost: https://inferenceisland.com/?de=lemmy-llama

Happy to share prompts, judge setup or numbers.