Bring your own brain? Why local LLMs are taking off

Local LLMs are gaining popularity as users seek privacy, cost control, and sovereignty over their AI interactions. People are running models on their own hardware due to concerns about data misuse by big tech companies, potential future price increases, and environmental impacts of cloud AI. Quantization techniques and software advances like ggml and Ollama now make it possible to run powerful models on consumer hardware, though cloud-based options still maintain a slight edge in performance.