The Complete Guide to Running AI Locally: Everything You Need to Know Before You Start

Running AI locally means downloading open-weight models like Llama or Qwen onto your own computer instead of using cloud services like ChatGPT. This approach offers privacy, no per-token costs, and offline access, but requires enough RAM — at least 8GB for smaller models, 48GB for powerful 30B models. Local models still lag behind cloud models for complex reasoning and vision tasks, and no single local model currently excels at everything.