Local AI / Local LLM
A complete 25-lesson course on running AI models on your own machine — Local AI vs Cloud AI, hardware and VRAM budgeting, quantization and model formats, Ollama and LM Studio, the local API, embeddings and local RAG, local agents and tool calling, security and privacy realities, fine-tuning vs RAG, and three hands-on projects: a chat assistant, a private document Q&A tool, and a local coding agent.
25 Lessons · 780 min · Learning Platform Editorial Team
What you need on the desk
- Any computer (CPU-only works for small models — a dedicated GPU is a bonus, not a requirement, and this is explained in Lesson 3)
- A terminal / command prompt
- Optionally Ollama or LM Studio installed later in the course, when you're ready to run a real model
Know this much before you start
- Basic computer literacy — installing an app, using a terminal to type a command, understanding what a file path is. Full beginner sections assume no programming background.
- Helpful but not required: basic Python or JavaScript/TypeScript, since the intermediate and advanced chapters build small local AI apps in both.
- Helpful but not required: basic familiarity with JSON and HTTP APIs, since a local model is used through a small local web server.
By the end, you can
- Explain Local AI vs Cloud AI honestly, including when hybrid architectures beat picking one side
- Estimate whether a model fits your hardware from its parameter count, quantization, and context window
- Run and configure real local models with Ollama and LM Studio, and know when to reach for llama.cpp directly
- Build a small app against a local model's API in both Python and JavaScript/TypeScript
- Design a local RAG pipeline (chunking, embeddings, vector search) and explain what it does and does not do to the model
- Recognize the real security and privacy risks of local AI, and why 'local' does not automatically mean 'private' or 'secure'
- Ship real projects: a local chat assistant, a private document Q&A tool, and a local coding agent with safe tool permissions