If you’re a frequent ChatGPT user, you may have noticed that the AI chatbot occasionally tends to go down or stop working at the most inconvenient of times. These outages usually don’t last very long, but after the last one left me stranded, I began yearning for a more reliable alternative. Luckily, it turns out that a simple solution does exist in the form of local language models like LLaMA 3. The best part? They can run even on relatively pedestrian hardware like a MacBook Air! Here’s everything I learned from using LLaMA 3 and how it compares vs ChatGPT.
Why you should care about local AI chatbots
Most of us have only ever used ChatGPT and well-known alternatives like Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini. However, all of these chatbots run on powerful servers in far-away data centers. But using the cloud just means relying on someone else’s computer, which can go down or stop working for hours on end.