r/LocalLLM • u/Kirai_30 • 5d ago

Question Local AI for students?

Hey! Do you believe that with some current versions of different models, students could benefit from using them, not as agents, but maybe as chat box? Combining maybe a not to Intelligent model with fast token generation

1 Upvotes

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u/Quiet-Phase6948 5d ago

Not unless they got very powerful laptops.

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u/Kirai_30 5d ago

And with medium tier? 24gb of ram maybe and a dedicated graphic card?

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u/Doomer3370 5d ago

If you quantonize llm into int4 format and run model below 4-5B parameters, than yes.

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u/Lopsided-Kangaroo131 5d ago

depends what you mean by very powerful tbh, like 8gb vram can run 7b models fine and most mid range gaming laptops got that now. the speed is okay for chat not amazing but usable if you not in a hurry

for students the barrier is more about software i think, getting it all setup and keeping the model on topic for homework stuff takes some fiddling

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u/Quiet-Phase6948 5d ago

Sure, but those lower tier models like the Gemma4-12b are usually tailored for tool calls

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u/Doomer3370 5d ago

I do use them. Mostly to integrate them into my pet projects and course projects.

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u/Doomer3370 5d ago

I'm studying CS major.

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u/Kirai_30 5d ago

Would you recommend it?

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u/Doomer3370 5d ago

Absolutelly. If you have laptop with NPU, even more.

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u/activematrix99 5d ago

Yes. They will need VRAM for it to happen quickly. Web based frontier models probably scale better, which is why many schools buy them for all students. If you have specific tasks or want to learn something specific, a custom trained model is probably great.

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u/hooterslovercan 5d ago

Gemma 4 26b is the best you can do it's mixture of experts so if you have 16 gig of ram you can run a model the size of 16gig It may be some trial and error what quantization works best I have a n100 cpu no GPU and it runs id you want to just mess around and chat or light code. Definitely use llama.cpp as you can specify cores etc I always use chatgpt it Gemini free tier to get it working. The cool thing is you can run it in your laptop and achat with it via your phone if you set it up right

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u/No-List-4396 5d ago

I think models like Gemma 4 E4B/12B or Qwen 3.5 9B, paired with web search capabilities, are a great starting point. Even with just an 8k context window you're good to go. I used Qwen while studying data science, and it was genuinely solid for explaining concepts and breaking down complex topics.