Why Run AI Locally? Security, Cost, and Control
Reading time: approx. 5 min
Cloud-based AI services like ChatGPT are fantastic, but they come with challenges regarding data integrity, costs, and connectivity requirements. Running AI models locally on your own computer offers a solution to many of these problems. In this lesson, we explore the main advantages and why this is especially relevant for those working in education.
What You Will Learn
You will understand the three main advantages of using local AI models:
- Data security and integrity: All information stays on your computer.
- Cost efficiency: No subscription fees or API charges.
- Flexibility and availability: Works without an internet connection.
The Basics: Local vs. Cloud-Based AI
When you use a cloud service (like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot), your prompt is sent over the internet to a server somewhere in the world. The server processes your question and sends back a response. This is convenient but means your data leaves your control.
Local AI means the entire AI model runs directly on your own computer hardware. No data is sent away. You have complete control over both the model and the information you input.
Practical Advantages in Your Professional Role
1. Complete Data Security As school staff, you often handle information that can be sensitive, even if it is not directly classified as personal data. This could include drafts of evaluations, notes about student needs, or planning for development meetings.
- Scenario: You want to brainstorm ideas for an educational assessment. By using a local AI, you can paste and process the text without any risk of the information leaking or being used to train external models.
2. Zero Ongoing Costs The most powerful cloud services often have a monthly fee or charge per API call. Local models are almost always free to download and use, with no limits on how much you use them.
- Scenario: The school has a limited budget for digital tools. Instead of purchasing expensive licenses, staff can use powerful local AI models on their work computers for a one-time hardware cost (if an upgrade is needed).
3. Freedom from the Internet Poor connectivity at school? Need to work on a train or at a summer cottage? With local AI, you are completely independent of the internet.
- Scenario: You are working on your lesson planning and the internet goes down. With a local model, you can continue generating quiz questions, summarizing texts, and getting help with phrasing without any disruption.
Things to Consider
The biggest disadvantage of local models is that they require a relatively modern and powerful computer, usually with a dedicated graphics card (GPU), to run quickly and efficiently. Performance will not always match the very largest and most expensive cloud models, but as you will see in this course, they are more than powerful enough for most work tasks. All tests and examples in this course were conducted on a computer with 8GB VRAM and 24GB RAM, which is not particularly much for a modern laptop.
Next Steps
Now that you understand why local AI is so useful, it is time to look at how you get started. In the next lesson, we introduce Ollama, the tool that makes it easy to install and run local AI models.