In today’s digital age, privacy-conscious tech enthusiasts are seeking alternatives to cloud-based AI services. What if you could run a powerful, ChatGPT-like AI directly on your personal computer, completely free of charge? This comprehensive guide will walk you through setting up a local large language model (LLM) that gives you full control over your AI interactions. You can pick and choose any AI model such as Meta’s Llama, Google’s Gemma, and even the recently popular and controversial DeepSeek R1.