Recently, there's been a lot of talk about local LLMs, especially lightweight models like the 7B parameter ones. Do you think we can actually run them efficiently on desktops, or is it just hype? They perform well in benchmarks, but how practical are they in real use? Any experiences to share? Can we get decent performance without specialized hardware?
Is it possible to run AI models locally now?
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Yeah, you can run it locally now, but the desktop experience isn’t quite as smooth as on a phone. A 7B parameter model chugs along at about 15 tokens/s on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (i7-1260P, 16GB RAM)—fine for short replies, but slow for anything longer. Pop in an RTX 3060 with CUDA, and it jumps to 60 tokens/s—big difference you feel right away.
Compared to my phone, running a local model feels similar: first you hit the wall of setup headaches (CUDA, Conda, PyTorch versions, etc.), then you realize just how limited it is. It’s not as slick as the ChatGPT app on iPhone, but you get offline use and privacy—just don’t expect miracles. Good for quick coding help, sure, but for deep analysis you’re still stuck with the cloud.
How do you achieve your performance results? What's your RAM and CPU usage like?