You can now run capable AI models on your own laptop
Free tools Ollama and LM Studio let you run open-weight AI models offline, with no subscription, though the biggest models still need serious hardware.
The facts
- According to Decrypt, citing Epoch AI's May 29 analysis, open-weight models have trailed the best closed models by an average of four months since January 2026.
- Ollama and LM Studio are free. Small models need roughly 8GB of VRAM or Mac unified memory, and LM Studio can work entirely offline.
- Gemma 4 downloads in Ollama's library range from about 4.6GB to 20GB, and OpenAI's gpt-oss-20b needs only 16GB of memory, according to the source.
- The largest open models, such as Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max with 2.4 trillion parameters, are far beyond consumer hardware, and closed models won 24 of 31 tests in Alibaba's own comparison.
Case notes · Danny's take
Why it matters
Every prompt you send to a cloud chatbot sits on someone else's server. A local model flips that: your conversation stays on your machine. That is not just a privacy point. It is also a cost point, because the software is free and only the hardware costs you. For people paying a dollar-denominated subscription from a naira income, that gap is real money. The catch is that the frontier models still lead on the hardest tasks.
For builders
Open licences such as Apache 2.0 and MIT let you modify and fine-tune models for a niche, for example medicine, instead of paying for a general-purpose one. Ollama also opens a local API on your machine, so you can wire a private model into your own apps. Check your memory budget first, because a model that spills out of VRAM runs much slower.
Not financial advice. Do your own investigation.
This story was summarised with AI from Decrypt's reporting and checked against our editorial policy. Danny's take reflects his views. Disclaimer.
Danny Walter
Founder of Moon Republic, Volt Terminal and Moon Republic Academy. Author of The Market Is a Crime Scene and After the Applause.