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Can I run AI locally?

canirun.ai

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Re: Can I run AI locally?

#231
Oddly, the website lists "M4 Ultra" which however does not exist... Also, it does not account for Apple Silicon chips to have up to 512GB of memory in some cases, but that might be only a limitation of the gathered data.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#232
The 'spent 100 hours configuring' part hits home. That fragmentation is exactly why we started building Olares (https://github.com/beclab/Olares).

It’s basically an open-source OS layer that standardizes the local AI stack—Kubernetes (K3s) for orchestration, standardized model serving, and GPU scheduling. The goal is to stop fiddling with Python environments/drivers and just treat local agents like standardized containers. It runs on Mac Minis or dedicated hardware.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#233

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…

Coding locally with Qwen3-Coder-Next or Qwen-3.5 is a piece of cake on a workstation card (RTX Pro 6000); set it up in llama.cpp or vLLM in 1 hour, install Claude Code, force local API hostname and fake secret key, and just run it like regular setup with Claude4 but on Qwen.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#234

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…

My experience with qwen3.5 9b has not been the same. It’s definitely good at agentic responses but it hallucinates a lot. 30%-50% of the content it generated for a research task (local code repo exploration) turned out to be plain wrong to the extent of made up file names and function names. I ran its output through KimiK2 and asked it to verify its output - which found out that much of what it had figured out after agentic exploration was plain wrong. So use smaller models but be very cautious how much you depend on their output.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#236
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What kind of small tasks do you find it's good at? My non-coding use of agents has been related to server admin, and my local-llm use-case is for 24/7 tasks that would be cost-prohibitive. So my best guess for this would be monitoring logs, security cameras, and general home automation tasks.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#237

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

The latest Librewolf prompted me to allow the site permission to make a WebGL context. That's what it used for hardware detection.

Re: Can I run AI locally?

#238
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…

I've created a llama.cpp integration with Copilot in vscode. The extension readme contains setup instructions: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=delft-so...
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