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Zdnet key takeaways
- AI continues to use and everything is increasing.
- There are many drawbacks in using cloud-hosted AI.
- Locally installed AI is easy to use and free.
AI is not going anywhere, and everyone knows that till now. People around the world are using AI about any reason or work that you can imagine. I know people who consider AI chatbots as friends. I also know people who see AI as a tool for research. And then there are people who use AI to write correspondence and other types of documents.
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When most people use AI, they use the choice of chat, mistral, copilot, Gemini or Cloud. Those services are cloud-hosted and are definitely their benefits. Others (like themselves) always opt for locally installed AI.
I have because of me.
What is locally established AI?
As the name means, locally established AI means that you have installed everything necessary on your personal desktop (or server) and are able to use it as you will use a cloud-hosted solution.
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Yes, it takes some knowledge to do the work, but it is much easier than what you can think. For example, you can install Olama and Olama Desktop apps in less than five minutes. Once you take care of it, you can enjoy your personal AI solution.
But why would you do?
lets chat.
1. Secrecy
This is a big for me. I am a very private person, and rather my AI use will not be scraped and used by a third party. I do not want a company using my AI interaction to train my LLM, nor do I want the third parties to use my chat to make my profile for targeted advertisements.
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It is part of the beauty that comes with local AI: you don’t have to worry about these things. Locally established AI solutions do not share telemetry or anything in their questions. When you go on this path, your data is safe, which means whatever you are doing research will not find your way in the hands of the third party.
2. Cost
The original version of the Chatgpt Plus is $ 20 per month. This may not take too much for something, but when you add it to all other membership, it adds. And, like mobile plans of the early 2000s, if you go to your data range, it will spend you.
(Disclosure: ZDNET’s original company Ziff Davis filed a case of April 2025 against Openai, alleging that it violates Ziff Davis copyright training and operating its AI system.)
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Locally installed AI is free. Duration. I have installed Olama and either MSty or official Olama app on all my machines and have not paid a penny for AI because I have started using it. Ask myself this question: Why am I paying for a service that I can do for free? Save yourself twenty rupees in a month and use locally installed AI.
3. motion
Listen to me on it. I realize that none of us have data centers in our homes that can match the power of chat. At the same time, when using a cloud-hosted AI, you have to deal with other issues, such as your internet connection speed. Should you suffer from slow internet speed, it can affect your AI chat.
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With locally established AI, you do not have to worry about internet speed and enjoy a level stability that you will not find otherwise. Even better, if you find your local AI chats are very slow, you can always upgrade your computer’s RAM or GPU to speed up things; This is not something you can do with a cloud-hosted AI.
4. Offline capacity
I have examples where my Internet connectivity is interrupted, but I can still interact with my locally established AI. Why? Because locally installed AI does not require internet connection. You need to use AI when you are using it locally.
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This offline capacity can definitely waste you a lot of time when you still need to do your research, but do not have an internet connection. I could close my lan and still use AI on my desktop or my laptop. Of course, if I close my LAN, I can’t reach the locally installed AI from a separate machine (which I ever do).
5. Environment
For me (and of course many others), this is a big issue: the environmental impact of cloud-hosted AI. A Paper from MIT This issue had to say:
“The computational power required to train tribal AI models often contain billions of parameters, such as GPT -4 of Openai, can demand a shocking amount of electricity, increasing carbon dioxide emissions and pressure on electric grids.”
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There are serious concerns about what AI will do to the environment over time. Not only AI companies consume a ton of electricity, but as an by -product of energy consumption, AI data centers generate too much heat that are sent to the environment. It is not durable, and this is yet another reason that I am happy that I opted to use locally installed AI instead of using any cloud-hosted option.
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