Local AI

Running capable models on your own hardware, privately, gets more practical every month. Guides and reviews for the local-first crowd.

  • A calm guide to running a decent AI model on your own laptop

    Running your own AI model used to be a project for people with a spare graphics card and a weekend to lose. In 2026 it is closer to installing an app. Here is the calm, no-hype version of how to get a genuinely useful model running on your own machine, and honest expectations about what it will and will not do.

  • Gemma 4 12B review: how good is a model that runs on your laptop now?

    Gemma 4 12B is not going to top any leaderboard, and reviewing it against the frontier would miss the point entirely. The question that matters is different: how much useful AI can you now run entirely on your own laptop, with the internet unplugged? The answer, it turns out, is a surprising amount.

  • Setting up a private, local AI stack for people who value their data

    If your work involves anything sensitive, client data, health records, unreleased products, legal material, the idea of piping it through someone else API should make you at least a little uncomfortable. The good news is that in 2026 you do not have to. A genuinely capable, fully private AI stack is now within reach for a normal team. Here is how to think about building one.

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