Here's some things you can do right now with local models on a consumer device:
- text-to-speech
- speech-to-text
- dictionary
- encyclopedia
- help troubleshooting errors
- generate common recipes and nutritional facts
- proofread emails, blog posts
- search a large trove of documents, find information, summarize it (RAG)
- manipulate your terminal/browser/etc
- analyze a picture or video
- generate a picture or video
- generate PDFs, documents, etc (code exec)
- simple programming
- financial analysis/planning
- math and science analysis
- find simple first aid/medical information
- "rubber ducking" but the duck talks back
A quarter of those don't need more than a gig of RAM, the rest benefit from more RAM. Technically you don't even need a GPU, it just makes it faster. I do half that stuff on my laptop with local models every day.
That said, it really doesn't need to be local. I like the idea that I can do all that stuff offline if I'm traveling, but I usually have cell service, and the total tokens is pretty cheap (like $2/month for all my non-coding AI use).
- text-to-speech - speech-to-text - dictionary - encyclopedia - help troubleshooting errors - generate common recipes and nutritional facts - proofread emails, blog posts - search a large trove of documents, find information, summarize it (RAG) - manipulate your terminal/browser/etc - analyze a picture or video - generate a picture or video - generate PDFs, documents, etc (code exec) - simple programming - financial analysis/planning - math and science analysis - find simple first aid/medical information - "rubber ducking" but the duck talks back
A quarter of those don't need more than a gig of RAM, the rest benefit from more RAM. Technically you don't even need a GPU, it just makes it faster. I do half that stuff on my laptop with local models every day.
That said, it really doesn't need to be local. I like the idea that I can do all that stuff offline if I'm traveling, but I usually have cell service, and the total tokens is pretty cheap (like $2/month for all my non-coding AI use).