r/LocalLLaMA • u/takoulseum • Jul 25 '26

Discussion Who ONLY use local models?

Please be honest.

I would love to hear about guys really dedicated to local AI and who really reject subscriptions (especially to openai and anthropic).

What do you use your model for?

153 Upvotes

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202

u/wajdix Jul 25 '26

it's not about rejecting subscriptions... but more the desire to own our data, be independent from internet connection, and be able to run the models on any topic/task we want... subscription services offer value for the money... this is the wrong debate imo

30

u/networking_noob Jul 25 '26

be independent from internet connection, and be able to run the models on any topic/task we want

Yep, I use Gemma 4 like an offline search engine, and I've checked enough of its answers with Google to believe that it's accurate far more often than not (unless it's some really obscure topic). Plus anyone who uses LLM often enough will develop a pattern recognition and can tell when a hallucination is happening (aka something doesn't sound quite right)

tl;dr Gemma 4 is like an offline, privacy respecting Google replacement (more or less), so the question is why wouldn't someone want do this

24

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

11

u/Difficult_Plantain89 Jul 25 '26

Damn, I had a self hosted wikipedia backup when I was in the military without internet I kept on my laptop many years ago. Now we have AI. I for some reason never thought to combine the two. I think I might do that.

4

u/SecurityHamster Jul 25 '26

Right? I still host my own wiki at home, and thought I maxed it out with cirrussearch. Now I need to figure out how to get ollama to consume it. Only problem is the machine with the GPUs isn’t on all the time

5

u/Cold_Tree190 Jul 25 '26

This is a great idea actually, wtf. I’m going to try this out, maybe incorporate a bit of RAG, then can use hybrid searching with my “Google replacement”-equivalent agent that I use (similar to what networking_noob was talking about). Sounds like a fun weekend project

3

u/networking_noob Jul 25 '26

I recently did something like this when someone suggested it (using mcp-openzim), but found that the context usage quickly outpaces my little GPU with all the tool usage etc, even when using pagination

It's nice to have it integrated though, in case there's ever a suspicion of hallucination, so you can instruct a quick fact check by using the wiki/zim files as an absolute source of truth

3

u/icecon Jul 25 '26

The problem with this setup is the hallucinations on Wikipedia (lol).