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Can I run AI locally?

canirun.ai

171–180 of 382 posts

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#171

Huh, I never knew my browser just volunteers my exact hardware specs to any website without so much as even notifying me about it.

It doesn’t really. The website thinks I’m on a iPhone 19 pro, although I’m actually on a iPhone SE 1st gen. So it’s off by roughly a decade.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#172
I can't tell at a glance what this page is showing, but I am curious about the licenses on the various models that let me run it locally and make money off it. Awhile ago only deepseek let you do that - not sure now.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#173

Huh, I never knew my browser just volunteers my exact hardware specs to any website without so much as even notifying me about it.

I thought that's how airlines do the whole trickery around having different pricing if you access the site from Windows or Mac...

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#174
post #29

Is there a reliable guide somewhere to setting up local AI for coding (please don’t say ‘just Google it’ - that just results in a morass of AI slop/SEO pages with out of date, non-self-consistent, incorrect or impossible instructions). I’d like to be able to use a local model (which one?) to power Copilot in vscode, and run coding agent(s) (not general purpose OpenClaw-like agents) on my M2 MacBook. I know it’ll be s…

Personally I'd start with llamafile [0] then move to compiling your own llama.cpp.

It's not as bad as you might think to compile llama.cpp for your target architecture and spin up an OpenAI compatible API endpoint. It even downloads the models for you.

[0]: https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#175

Huh, I never knew my browser just volunteers my exact hardware specs to any website without so much as even notifying me about it.

This stuff is used a lot in browser fingerprinting for tracking purposes. More privacy-focused browsers usually feed randomized info.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#176
post #151

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…

Just want to echo the recommendation for qwen3.5:9b. This is a smol, thinking, agentic tool-using, text-image multimodal creature, with very good internal chains of thought. CoT can be sometimes excessive, but it leads to very stable decision-making process, even across very large contexts -something we haven't seen models of this size before. What's also new here, is VRAM-context size trade-off: for 25% of it's atte…

I've been building a harness for qwen3.5:9b lately (to better understand how to create agentic tools/have fun) and I'm not going to use it instead of Opus 4.6 for my day job but it's remarkably useful for small tasks. And more than snappy enough on my equipment. It's a fun model to experiment with. I was previously using an old model from Meta and the contrast in capability is pretty crazy.

I like the idea of finding practical uses for it, but so far haven't managed to be creative enough. I'm so accustomed to using these things for programming.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#177
post #151

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…

Just want to echo the recommendation for qwen3.5:9b. This is a smol, thinking, agentic tool-using, text-image multimodal creature, with very good internal chains of thought. CoT can be sometimes excessive, but it leads to very stable decision-making process, even across very large contexts -something we haven't seen models of this size before. What's also new here, is VRAM-context size trade-off: for 25% of it's atte…

How's it compare in quality with larger models in the same series? E.g 122b?

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I have a 13" gaming tablet with the 128 GB AMD Strix Halo chip (Ryzen AI Max+ 395, what a name). Asus ROG Flow Z13. It's a beast; the performance is totally disproportionate to its size & form factor. I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to with "Only Apple has the unique dynamic allocation though." On Strix Halo you set the fixed VRAM size to 512 MB in the BIOS, and you set a few Linux kernel params that…

What operating system are you using? I was looking at this exact machine as a potential next upgrade.

Arch with KDE, it works perfectly out of the box.

I configured/disabled RGB lighting in Windows before wiping and the settings carried over to Linux. On Arch, install & enable power-profiles-daemon and you can switch between quiet/balanced/performance fan & TDP profiles. It uses the same profiles & fan curves as the options in Asus's Windows software. KDE has native integration for this in the GUI in the battery menu. You don't need to install asus-linux or rog-control-center.

For local AI: set VRAM size to 512 MB in the BIOS, add these kernel params:

ttm.pages_limit=31457280 ttm.page_pool_size=31457280 amd_iommu=off

Pages are 4 KiB each, so 120 GiB = 120 x 1024^3 / 4096 = 31457280

To check that it worked: sudo dmesg | grep "amdgpu.*memory" will report two values. VRAM is what's set in BIOS (minimum static allocation). GTT is the maximum dynamic quota. The default is 48 GB of GTT. So if you're running small models you actually don't even need to do anything, it'll just work out of the box.

LM Studio worked out of the box with no setup, just download the appimage and run it. For Ollama you just `pacman -S ollama-rocm` and `systemctl enable --now ollama`, then it works. I recently got ComfyUI set up to run image gen & 3d gen models and that was also very easy, took I can't believe this machine is still going for $2,800 with 128 GB. It's an incredible value.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#179
post #145

This (+ llmfit) are great attempts, but I've been generally frustrated by how it feels so hard to find any sort of guidance about what I would expect to be the most straightforward/common question: "What is the highest-quality model that I can run on my hardware, with tok/s greater than , and context limit greater than " (My personal approach has just devolved into guess-and-check, which is time consuming.) When usin…

What is the $/Mtok that would make you choose your time vs savings of running stuff locally? Just to be clear, it may sound like a snarky comment but I'm really curious from you or others how do you see it. I mean there are some batches long running tasks where ignoring electricity it's kind of free but usually local generation is slower (and worse quality) and we all kind of want some stuff to get done. Or is it not…

For me it's a combination of privacy and wanting to be able to experiment as much as I want without limits. I'd happily take something that is 80% as good as SOTA but I can run it locally 24/7. I don't think there's anything out there yet that would 100% obviate my desire to at least occasionally fall back to e.g. Claude, but I think most of it could be done locally if I had infinite tokens to throw at it.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#180

I can't tell at a glance what this page is showing, but I am curious about the licenses on the various models that let me run it locally and make money off it. Awhile ago only deepseek let you do that - not sure now.

nice, this is an interesting idea. Can you elaborate on the licensing issue ? how do you get blocked for using the models commercially ?
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