Published Jun 18, 2026, 4:30 PM EDT Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf . Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design. Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games. Local LLMs are moving fast. In the six or so months I've been running them on my own PC , what's actually available has changed a lot, and not always in the direction of bigger. The people building these models understand who's actually running them, which is mostly normal folks with consumer hardware, not labs or server farms. So a lot of the recent work has gone into making smaller models that hold up well on regular GPUs instead of chasing parameter counts nobody can run anyway. Google's new Gemma 4 12B is a pretty clean example of that direction .…