Weights you cannot run are a file

An open model on your disk is only a large file until something runs it. If the only place that can run it is a rented data center, you are still a tenant.

I come at this from edge work. Models on a drone have to run on the device, with no network at all. That makes me sympathetic to the local-first argument, and also impatient with claims that ignore physics. I wrote about that shift in my piece on edge AI .

There are three ways to run a model outside a hyperscaler. I will take them in order of how well they work.

Tier one: run it yourself

This is the part of the story that has clearly arrived.

Tools such as llama.cpp and Ollama made local inference a one-line install. Quantization, which stores each weight in about 4 bits, cut memory needs to roughly a quarter of the original with modest quality loss.

A compilation of published benchmarks from October 2026 gives a sense of current speeds.…