Best Local LLM Runners (August 2026)
Ollama, LM Studio, Jan, llama.cpp and vLLM compared: licences, engines, OpenAI-compatible APIs, multi-user serving, and which to install first.
Category
Local AI
Best Local RAG Setups (August 2026)
Six self-hosted RAG stacks compared: AnythingLLM, Open WebUI, LibreChat, Msty, RAGFlow, Cherry Studio. Licences, embedders, and who can rerank.
Best Open-Weight Models, Ranked by Capability (August 2026)
Sixteen downloadable-weight models ranked by capability and licence, with every parameter count and licence re-checked against the Hugging Face API.
Liquid AI Lands on Setapp While iOS Private Relay Leaks Real IPs
Liquid AI's 2.6B model ships via Setapp for offline Mac agents, while iCloud Private Relay leaks real IPs through passkeys in the same 24 hours.
Best Local Embedding and Reranker Models by VRAM (September 2026)
Local embedding and reranking models for RAG, sized by VRAM. Real GGUF file sizes, licences, and the runtime gap that stops Ollama reranking.
Best Local Image Generation Models by VRAM (2026)
Open image models sized for real GPUs, with the text encoder counted in and the licence checked. FLUX, Z-Image, Qwen-Image and SD3.5 compared.
6GB VRAM: What You Can Actually Run Locally (2026)
Local AI on a 6GB GPU: GTX 1660, RTX 2060, RTX 3050 and laptop cards. Real weight sizes for chat, coding, vision, speech, translation and RAG.
Local AI by VRAM: Which Models Fit Your GPU (September 2026)
Find your VRAM tier, then the current open-weight pick for chat, coding, vision, speech, translation or agents. Eighteen guides, one index.
Run an LLM Locally on Android and iPhone (August 2026)
Apple caps its on-device model at 4096 tokens per session, and Google's own tables put Gemma 4 E2B at 25.0 decode tokens/sec on an iPhone 17 Pro CPU.
Run LLMs Locally on a Mac: What Actually Fits (September 2026)
Apple Silicon has no discrete VRAM, so tier guides mislead Mac owners. The real ceilings are bandwidth and the GPU-usable slice of unified memory.
GGUF vs AWQ vs GPTQ vs MLX: Which Quantization to Use
Quantization formats compared with real file sizes and bits per weight. Why Q4 does not halve a model, and why low quants generate faster.
Qwen3.8-Max Goes Open Weight; 27B Targets 17GB
Alibaba announced 2.4T-parameter Qwen3.8-Max open weights and a 27B sibling that Unsloth says will run in 17GB of RAM or VRAM.
NVIDIA Cosmos-H-Dreams: Real-Time Open Surgical Simulator
NVIDIA's Cosmos-H-Dreams runs at 160 fps on one RTX PRO 6000, with weights, code, dataset, and recipe open. Not a robot controller, NVIDIA warns.
Kimi K3 Weights Are Public: 2.8T Params, 64-GPU Reality
Moonshot released the full Kimi K3 weights on July 27, 2026: 2.8T params, 1M context, MXFP4. Read the license before you plan a deployment.
MiniMax-M3 Lands in llama.cpp: Sparse Attention and Vision
Two back-to-back merges add MiniMax Sparse Attention and a Qwen2.5-VL style vision tower to llama.cpp, but every existing MiniMax-M3 GGUF must be regenerated.
Cisco's Open Antares Models Let You Audit Code Locally
Cisco released Antares-350M and Antares-1B open-weight models for vulnerability localization. They run locally and cost about 172x less than GPT-5.5.
Nativ: A Mac-Native Local AI App Built by the MLX-VLM Maintainer
Prince Canuma's open-source Nativ wraps MLX in a SwiftUI chat app with a localhost API for Claude Code, Codex, and other coding agents.
Current AI Wants to Build a Free World Wide Web of AI
Backed by $400M, the nonprofit Current AI wants to build a free, public-interest AI stack modeled on the early Web. Here's who's funding it and what's shipping.
Bonsai 27B and Inkling Test the Limits of Open Weights
Two new open-weight models point in opposite directions: Bonsai brings a 27B model toward phones, while Inkling targets customization at data-center scale.
VKUE: Can a 34.7B Reasoner Run on a Laptop Without a GPU?
VIDRAFT_LAB posts Ourbox-35B-JGOS to Hugging Face: 20 tok/s on an 8GB laptop GPU, ~17 tok/s on a CPU-only server, 86.4% on GPQA Diamond.
A 330 GB On-Die DRAM AI Chip Lands as a Whitepaper
PhantaField's Sophon PFG-1 whitepaper claims ~95x Nvidia HBM4 bandwidth via monolithic 3D stacking. No silicon yet. Here's why it matters anyway.
Open Source AI Wins: Five Frontier Models Ship in 30 Days
DeepSeek V4, Cohere Command A+, ZAYA1-8B, and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 mark the busiest month for open-weight AI ever.
Open-Weight LLM Showdown Week 16: Kimi K2.6 Storms the Rankings, Qwen 3.6 Holds the Line, and Consumer GPUs Hit a Ceiling
Three weeks away and the leaderboard reshuffled. Kimi K2.6 brings 1T parameters under open weights, Qwen 3.6 stays the consumer GPU king, and DeepSeek V4-Flash proves too hungry for single-card setups.
Open Source AI Closes the Gap: GLM-5.1 Tops SWE-Bench
GLM-5.1 becomes the first open-weight model to top SWE-Bench Pro. The gap between open and proprietary AI is now just three months.