Ditch the Cloud: 7 Powerful, Free Local AI Tools — Virtualization Review

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Ditch the Cloud: 7 Powerful, Free Local AI Tools

In a set of recent articles, I discussed how to run AI locally on both physical and virtual machines. By running AI models and AI applications locally, you can choose between hundreds of different large language models (the brains behind AI) and gain greater control over where the data is stored, while using excess CPU and GPU resources to reduce the amount of money you spend on cloud-based AI.

In those articles, I used LLMfit to find an LLM suited to the hardware I had, Geekbench AI to quantify the hardware’s AI performance and Aipex to monitor the CPU and GPU usage of the systems. For the most part, those articles were theoretical, since most people do not want to run an LLM; they want to do something useful with it. Still, chatbots are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to running AI-based applications locally, as there are free projects and applications that let you do everything from coding to converting text to speech.

Below is a summary of the ones I have used, and a few others are on my list to use and write about.

LM Studio — Chatbot Like ChatGPT
LM Studio is a desktop application for running large language models locally rather than relying on a cloud service. Users can download AI models such…