What is Local LLM?
TL;DR
LLMs that run on your own PC or server without cloud services. Advantageous for privacy and cost.
Local LLM: Definition & Explanation
A Local LLM is an LLM that runs directly on your own PC or on-premises server, rather than using cloud APIs from providers like OpenAI or Anthropic. Open-weight models such as Llama 3, Mistral, Phi-3, and Gemma can be easily run using tools like LM Studio, Ollama, GPT4All, and Jan. Benefits include complete privacy protection since data never leaves your device, elimination of API fees, and the ability to operate offline without internet connectivity. Thanks to quantization techniques, models with 7B-13B parameters can run at practical speeds on typical PCs with just 8-16GB of RAM.