AI glossary · Building and running AI
Local AI
Local AI means running an AI model on your own phone or computer instead of on a company’s servers, so it can work offline and keep your data on your device.
Also called on-device AI, edge AI, local LLM, offline AI
In more detail
Open-weight models like Llama can be downloaded and run with free apps. Smaller or quantized models run on ordinary laptops; bigger ones need a powerful GPU.
The trade-off is that local models are usually less capable than the largest cloud models. Many products mix both: quick tasks on-device, harder ones in the cloud.
Example
Running a small language model on your laptop to summarise confidential documents without uploading them.
Related terms
Open-source AIOpen-source AI means models that are free to download, use and modify. Many are “open-weight”: the trained model is shared, but not the data it was trained on.Small language model (SLM)A small language model (SLM) is a compact language model with far fewer parameters than an LLM, built to be fast, cheap and able to run on a phone or laptop.QuantizationQuantization shrinks an AI model by storing its numbers with less precision, so it uses less memory and runs faster, with a small loss in quality.NPUAn NPU (neural processing unit) is a chip built to run AI tasks efficiently on phones and laptops, without draining the battery or sending data to the cloud.AI privacyAI privacy is about how AI tools collect, store and use your personal information, including what you type into chatbots and whether it is used for training.
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