Running models yourself changes the economics and the privacy picture, and costs you convenience and some quality. This category is where members work out whether that trade is worth making for a given use case.
Threads cover which open models are currently worth running, quantisation levels and the quality they cost, hardware requirements including the honest VRAM numbers rather than the minimums, inference tooling and serving options, fine tuning on your own data, and licence terms, which vary far more than the phrase open source implies.
Comparisons against hosted frontier models are useful when they are honest. Local models have closed much of the gap on many tasks and not on others, and members here are usually specific about which is which.
Setup writeups with your actual hardware and measured throughput are the most valuable posts. See AI Infrastructure & Hardware for the hardware side and Privacy & Data for the data control argument.
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