Install AI on PC

The simplest way to install an AI on your PC is to download a program like LM Studio or Ollama and, from there, download an open model that fits on your machine. In a little while you have a chat running on your computer, and from then on you don't need the internet to use it. You don't need to know how to code to take this first step, though you do need some patience with the downloads, which weigh several gigabytes.

Before installing anything, look at what hardware you have: the graphics card's memory (VRAM) and the RAM decide which models you can run. A normal laptop can handle small models, even if they're slow; with a mid-range graphics card things change quite a bit. When choosing a model you'll see numbers like 7B or 14B: they indicate its size in billions of parameters, which are, so to speak, the pieces it "thinks" with. You'll also see quantized versions, which simply means compressed: they take up less space in exchange for losing some quality. If everything is painfully slow, it's almost always because the model is too big for your machine.

My advice is to start with what you already have before buying anything: that way you find out whether local AI is any use to you before spending money. In "What hardware you need to run your own artificial intelligence" I explain which machines and graphics cards I use to run models at home and what you'd need to get started depending on your setup.