Local AI Workshop

Back for a 3rd session! AI is not just chatgpt.com where you're reliant on an opaque service provider that is sycophantic, increasingly pricy, changes behavior etc. Much of the AI space is open source and that has engendered a very rich ecosystem of open weight models that you can download, run and host completely FREE on your own computer. The latest open models are competitive with the best Claude/GPT models and can handle any use case from coding agents to making recipes Feeling the pinch of token costs? hitting usage limits? worried about privacy? Do you want to own rather than rent? Or just want to have fun playing with this magical tech, there is locally hostable AI for you. We'll get you setup to run local models on your computer in this workshop. No fancy hardware or technical experience needed! - there's very usable AI for whatever device you own down to an iPhone or a Raspberry Pi. Agenda Tracks This is a live, interactive session - please bring your laptop or device of choice. We'll spend most of our time getting you functional with local, open weight models and open source software. Planned stack: Qwen3.6, llama.cpp and pi - but we'll introduce the options available out there.