Running your own local AI: owning it instead of renting it from the giants.
The honest answer on whether home AI is greener (not automatically), and the concrete ways to make it so: right-sizing models with automated routing (LiteLLM, RouteLLM), killing idle power, capping GPU draw, reusing waste heat, and solar. Part 9, the finale of Own Your AI.
A grounded build guide for local AI, from spending nothing to a serious home rig. Why a single high-VRAM card is the real sweet spot, the Apple Silicon shortcut, and why PewDiePie’s multi-GPU monster is a hobby, not a requirement. Part 8 of Own Your AI.
Self-hosting AI genuinely improves your privacy, but it makes you the security team. Here’s the honest reality and a short do-it-right checklist: keep it on localhost, safe remote access, mind the agents, handle keys properly. Part 7 of Own Your AI.
Gemma, Llama, Qwen, GPT-OSS: which open model should you run locally? A plain guide by hardware tier, how VRAM and quantisation decide it, matching the model to the job, and the honest ceiling versus the frontier. Part 6 of Own Your AI.
A straight comparison of the four local-AI tools worth your time, with a simple ‘pick this if’ for each. Spoiler: there’s no single winner, and for most people the boring default is the right one. Part 5 of Own Your AI.
A hands-on, even-handed look at Odysseus, PewDiePie’s open-source AI workspace: the genuinely impressive feature set, the short Docker setup, and an honest read on who it’s for (and who’s better off with something simpler). Part 4 of Own Your AI.
A genuine beginner’s guide to running an AI model on your own computer: install Ollama, one line to download a model, an optional chat window, honest hardware expectations, and what local AI is (and isn’t) good at. Part 3 of Own Your AI.
Five clear-eyed reasons to reduce your dependence on the AI giants, price, privacy, deprecation, outages and lock-in, plus the honest counter-case the self-host crowd skips. Part 2 of the Own Your AI series.
PewDiePie released a free, open-source AI workspace called Odysseus, and with it, a big idea: own your AI instead of renting it. Part 1 of our Own Your AI series makes the honest case, no doom required.