Small models, big effects: AI that runs on your own machine
A model with a few billion parameters fits in the memory of an ordinary laptop once quantised. What it does well, what it does badly, and how to try it without installing anything exotic.
Tag
Language models
Open models or closed APIs: how to choose
Host a model yourself or pay for an API: the right answer depends on five criteria you can examine one by one. Real cost, privacy, latency, licence and dependency, without dogma.
RAG: making a model answer from your own documents
A model has not read your documents. RAG means finding the right passages before you ask it the question. Chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, citations: where quality is won and where it is lost.
What an AI agent really is
The word “agent” is used to sell everything. Underneath sits a fairly simple loop: a model picks an action, a program runs it, a result comes back. What matters is the limits you put around it.