Sup champ,
I have a gnarly cold, courtesy of travelling back from my onsite last week.
Not sure if it was from a colleague, but whoever you are, I wish your pillows always stay warm at night. At least for the duration of my sickness. Yes, I am a spiteful person.
WTF is... a local model?
Ever since the whole Fable 5 situation, local models have been coming up a lot in conversation. So let's talk about it.
Every AI tool you use right now lives on someone else's server. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini. You open the app, type something, and your message gets sent to a company's computer somewhere, processed, and sent back. You're always one decision, one government directive, one outage away from losing access.
That's where local models come in. Instead of your prompts going to someone else's server, the AI runs directly on your own device. You download it once and it lives on your computer. No internet required. Nothing you type leaves your machine. Nobody can shut it down.
That's why people are into it. Control.
And it's more accessible than you'd think. The two most popular tools for running local models are LM Studio and Ollama. LM Studio is the one I'd point most people to. It's a desktop app with a chat interface that looks and feels a lot like ChatGPT. You download it, pick a model, and start chatting. The models themselves are free. The tools are free. You're basically just using your own computer.
So what's the catch? Local models are good, genuinely good, but they're still roughly 3 to 6 months behind frontier models like Claude Opus 4.8 or GPT-5.5 in terms of capability. For most everyday tasks that gap doesn't really matter.
And if you use Codex, you can swap out the model powering it for a local one. Same Codex interface, but the AI running underneath lives on your machine.
Honestly though? I'm not personally rushing to set one up. I get why people want the control, I just don't want to deal with downloading, managing, and maintaining another thing. If the government wants to take away my access to a powerful model capable of taking over the world, be my guest.
Go try something,
—Tyler
PS. What AI term would you like me to write about next? Reply and let me know!