Local / Private AI — Your Brain, Your Machine, Your Rules

Here's a radical idea: what if you could run a genuinely smart AI on your own hardware, and nothing you told it would ever leave your machine? No cloud servers. No data collection. No subscription fees. Just you, your laptop, and an intelligence that respects your privacy by design. Welcome to the open-weight revolution.

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GPT-OSS 20B

By OpenAI · MIT License · Runs on 16GB RAM

What It Actually Is

This is OpenAI doing something nobody expected: releasing a genuinely capable model under the MIT license. GPT-OSS 20B is a 20-billion-parameter model that runs on consumer hardware — a laptop with 16GB of RAM and a modest GPU can handle it. No cloud account, no API key, no subscription. Download it, run it, own it.

The strategic logic is clever. By offering a strong open-weight model, OpenAI ensures that the "base layer" of AI stays within their ecosystem, even for users who'd never sign up for ChatGPT. But the practical benefit is real: this is genuinely useful AI that runs offline, keeps your data private, and costs nothing after the initial download. For developers building AI-powered applications, GPT-OSS 20B is a foundation that doesn't come with a monthly bill.

Key Strengths

  • MIT License: True open-source freedom. Modify it, embed it in commercial products, fine-tune it for your domain — no restrictions, no royalties.
  • 16GB RAM minimum: Actually runs on consumer hardware. No need for a $10,000 GPU workstation.
  • Complete privacy: Everything stays on your machine. No data leaves your environment. Perfect for medical records, legal documents, financial data, or anything you'd never paste into a cloud AI.
  • Fine-tunable: Train it on your specific domain data — company documentation, medical literature, legal precedents — without sharing that data with anyone.
  • Zero ongoing cost: After the initial download, there are no API fees, no subscriptions, no per-token billing. Run it a million times for free.
What Sets It Apart
  • License — MIT (fully open)Unrestricted commercial use. No usage reporting, no API fees, no vendor lock-in. You own the deployment entirely.
  • Size — 20B parametersSmall enough to run on consumer hardware (16GB RAM minimum) while large enough for genuinely useful text generation, coding, and reasoning tasks.
  • Quantization — 4-bit to full precisionAvailable in multiple precision formats. 4-bit quantization runs on laptops; full precision maximizes quality on workstations with dedicated GPUs.

Honest Limitations

  • Not GPT-5: 20B parameters is impressive for local use but it's not competing with GPT-5.2 or Claude Opus on raw reasoning capability. It's excellent, not elite.
  • Setup friction: "Download and run" still requires some technical comfort. Tools like Ollama and LM Studio make it easier, but it's not as simple as opening a browser tab.
  • Speed on CPU: Without a dedicated GPU, inference speed is noticeably slower than cloud APIs. Acceptable for many uses, frustrating for interactive chat.
  • No web access: Running locally means no real-time web search. Knowledge is limited to the training data plus whatever you've fine-tuned into it.

The Verdict: The most important open-source AI release from a major lab. GPT-OSS 20B means that privacy-conscious individuals and organizations can use genuinely capable AI without sending a single byte to the cloud. The quality-to-accessibility ratio is unprecedented. If you have a decent laptop and care about data sovereignty, this is your model.

Further Reading

OpenAI ↗ Ollama (local model runner) ↗ r/LocalLLaMA Community ↗

GLM-5

By Zhipu AI (Z.ai) · MIT License · 2026

What It Actually Is

If GPT-OSS is OpenAI's gift to the open-source community, GLM-5 is China's answer — and in some respects, it goes further. Built by Zhipu AI (the team behind ChatGLM), GLM-5 is an open-weight model with an integrated web agent capable of web browsing, file manipulation, and running code. It's not just a language model — it's a local AI agent with agency.

The significance extends beyond the technical. GLM-5's MIT license, expansive context window, and agentic capabilities mean that the open-source AI frontier isn't a one-company, one-country game. Two different organizations, on opposite sides of the Pacific, independently decided that powerful AI should be freely available. Whatever your views on AI geopolitics, that's a hopeful data point.

Key Strengths

  • Agentic capabilities: Built-in web agent that can browse websites, manipulate files, and run code autonomously — not just answer questions, but do things.
  • MIT License: Fully open, no usage restrictions, no royalties — same freedom as GPT-OSS.
  • Long context window: Can handle extensive documents and conversations in a single session.
  • Multi-modal: Handles text, code, and structured data natively.
  • Strong bilingual performance: Exceptional Chinese and English capabilities, making it particularly valuable for bilingual workflows.
What Sets It Apart
  • Bilingual — English + Chinese nativelyUnlike most open models that are English-first, GLM-5 is trained for genuine bilingual fluency — critical for businesses operating across language markets.
  • License — Apache 2.0 (open)Permissive commercial license from Zhipu AI. Full weights available for download and self-hosting with no usage restrictions.
  • Multimodal — Text, image, codeHandles text generation, image understanding, and code generation in a single model — unusual capability breadth for an open-weight model at this size.

Honest Limitations

  • Western ecosystem integration: Documentation, community resources, and tooling support are more developed in the Chinese-language ecosystem. English resources are growing but less mature.
  • Agentic reliability: The web agent capabilities are impressive but not foolproof. Autonomous file manipulation requires careful sandboxing.
  • Hardware requirements: The full model requires more powerful hardware than GPT-OSS 20B. Quantized versions bring it down to consumer range.
  • Data provenance: Training data composition is less transparent than some Western counterparts.

The Verdict: The most capable open-source AI agent you can run locally. If you need an AI that doesn't just answer questions but actually takes actions — browsing, coding, file management — GLM-5's built-in agent capabilities set it apart. The bilingual strength makes it uniquely valuable for anyone working across English and Chinese contexts.

Further Reading

Z.ai (Zhipu AI) ↗ THUDM on GitHub ↗ r/LocalLLaMA Community ↗