What Can You Actually Do With a Local Small LLM? A Practical Guide
Running a local small LLM takes five minutes with Ollama. Knowing what to actually do with one takes longer to figure out — the use cases that make local AI genuinely useful are different from what most people expect after years of cloud AI, and the cases where a local model is the wrong tool entirely are just as important to know upfront. This post answers the question directly. Here is what a local small LLM does well, what it does badly, and which model and hardware configuration makes sense for each job. Links throughout point to the deeper guides on this blog for each model and runtime. ...