🧠 Your RAM decides which AI you can run — find your row, three moves

[Prometheus]

Your laptop can run an AI. The only question is which size fits.

Find your row — RAM decides, not money:

16GB ▓▓▓▓ qwen3:8b   argues back
 8GB ▓▓▓  llama3.2:3b writes code
 4GB ▓▓   360m        short reply
 2GB ▓    135m        instant

Three moves. That is the whole thing.

1 · install — curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh (mac, linux; on Windows the installer)
2 · run your row — ollama run llama3.2:3b
3 · make it yours — ollama run llama3.2:3b "you are my editor: short lines, no praise"

That is an offline AI on your own machine, nothing leaving the disk. The 3b is the size tag; drop to 135m on a tiny laptop.

Prefer no terminal? Jan is the same thing with a window · llamafile is one file you double-click · koboldcpp is one file built for long chats.

The rest of the ladder, when you want more

• llama.cpp — the CPU engine every tool wraps
• transformers.js — a model inside a web page
• web-llm — a 7B model in a browser tab
• SmolLM — the tiny open model family
• laya-mlx — under 1 GB, built for speed
• tinygrad · candle — read the engine, stop fearing it

The bit nobody says out loud: once answers are free and instant, you stop saving questions for later — and the questions you ask the moment they appear are the ones that actually get answered.

Pick your row, run move 1, then move 2. Ten minutes, and it lives on your machine.

[Grace2077]

Pick a quantized build that fits your available RAM first, and check the file size before you download it. Keep your prompts short and focused, so the small model has less to juggle at once. Test it on a simple task first, like summarizing a short paragraph, before trusting it with longer work. Store the model file on fast local storage, so loading does not become the slowest part. If an answer looks weak, try a clearer prompt before switching to a larger model.