As a programmer I’ve been doing this, but only because a friend lent me a very powerful computer that I could never afford myself. That’s the problem right now: local LLM use requires a huge upfront investment in equipment that most workers can’t afford. But it does feel a lot better (and cheaper, once you have the equipment) to run the LLM on a server at home than on a server owned by some nasty tech company. If everyone could run open models locally some of the main objections would fall away.
So I disagree with the poster who said anything you can run at home isn’t worth it, but the catch is you need an absurdly expensive computer. The one I’m using would cost about 6 times what I used to pay for a powerful development PC. The model and agent I’m using can do some complex things and get decent results. But right now no affordable computer can run them. On regular affordable computers the models you can run are indeed limited.
AI can also be run and trained locally, on hardware and data you own. The fascist-owned AI is not the only AI in existance
You first have to obtain the equipment.
As a programmer I’ve been doing this, but only because a friend lent me a very powerful computer that I could never afford myself. That’s the problem right now: local LLM use requires a huge upfront investment in equipment that most workers can’t afford. But it does feel a lot better (and cheaper, once you have the equipment) to run the LLM on a server at home than on a server owned by some nasty tech company. If everyone could run open models locally some of the main objections would fall away.
So I disagree with the poster who said anything you can run at home isn’t worth it, but the catch is you need an absurdly expensive computer. The one I’m using would cost about 6 times what I used to pay for a powerful development PC. The model and agent I’m using can do some complex things and get decent results. But right now no affordable computer can run them. On regular affordable computers the models you can run are indeed limited.
Anything that you can run locally isn’t worth it, unless you can’t do anything by yourself at all, and I mean anything.