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Can I run AI locally?

canirun.ai

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Re: Can I run AI locally?

#221
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me and probably many other people, local has nothing to do with cost and everything to do with privacy

genuine question - what are you working on that needs that level of privacy? outside of NSFW stuff most API providers arent doing anything with your prompts

I would answer that, but it's private :)

I can think of several reasons: corporate policy, personal principles, NSFW stuff, illegal stuff

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#222
post #104

I have spent a HUGE amount of time the last two years experimenting with local models. A few lessons learned: 1. small models like the new qwen3.5:9b can be fantastic for local tool use, information extraction, and many other embedded applications. 2. For coding tools, just use Google Antigravity and gemini-cli, or, Anthropic Claude, or... Now to be clear, I have spent perhaps 100 hours in the last year configuring l…

I'd love to know how you fit smaller models into your workflow. I have an M4 Macbook Pro w/ 128GB RAM and while I have toyed with some models via ollama, I haven't really found a nice workflow for them yet.

Not OP but I had an XML file with inconsistent formatting for album releases. I wanted to extract YouTube links from it, but the formatting was different from album to album. Nothing you could regex or filter manually. I shoved it all into a DB, looked up the album, then gave the xml to a local LLM and said "give me the song/YouTube pairs from this DB entry". Worked like a charm.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#223

I have spent a HUGE amount of time the last two years experimenting with local models. A few lessons learned: 1. small models like the new qwen3.5:9b can be fantastic for local tool use, information extraction, and many other embedded applications. 2. For coding tools, just use Google Antigravity and gemini-cli, or, Anthropic Claude, or... Now to be clear, I have spent perhaps 100 hours in the last year configuring l…

Becoming a retired builder is the ultimate bliss.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#225

I have spent a HUGE amount of time the last two years experimenting with local models. A few lessons learned: 1. small models like the new qwen3.5:9b can be fantastic for local tool use, information extraction, and many other embedded applications. 2. For coding tools, just use Google Antigravity and gemini-cli, or, Anthropic Claude, or... Now to be clear, I have spent perhaps 100 hours in the last year configuring l…

Anecdotal but for some reason I had a pretty bad time with qwen3.5 locally for tool usage. I've been using GPT-OSS-120B successfully and switched to qwen so that I could process images as well (I'm using this for a discord chat bot). Everything worked fine on GPT but Qwen as often as not preferred to pretend to call a tool and not actually call it. After much aggravation I wound up just setting my bot / llama swap to…

[flagged]

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#226
Cool project!!

It would be useful to filter which model to use based on the objective or usage (i.e., for data extraction vs. coding).

Also, just looking at VRAM kind of misses that a lot of CPU memory can be shared with the GPU via layer offloading. I think there is ultimately a need for a native client, like a CPU/GPU benchmark, to figure out how the model will actually perform more precisely.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#227

I have spent a HUGE amount of time the last two years experimenting with local models. A few lessons learned: 1. small models like the new qwen3.5:9b can be fantastic for local tool use, information extraction, and many other embedded applications. 2. For coding tools, just use Google Antigravity and gemini-cli, or, Anthropic Claude, or... Now to be clear, I have spent perhaps 100 hours in the last year configuring l…

Thanks for this, Mark. And for your website and books and generosity of spirit. Signal in the noise. Have an awesome weekend!

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#228
This was depressing. But, also, I can't figure why AI companies are valued so high. The models will reach a limit (ie for what most people want to use a model for), and compute will increase over time.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#229

This was depressing. But, also, I can't figure why AI companies are valued so high. The models will reach a limit (ie for what most people want to use a model for), and compute will increase over time.

Also, I have to add, this project is an excellent piece of work.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#230
This says I can't run anything, because it's missing some of the smallest models. I know that I can run Qwen3.5 up to 4B, Ministral 3B, Qwen3VL up to 4B, and I know there are some Gemmas and Llamas in my size range.
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