Running open-weight models locally: when is it actually worth it?
Posted by Applied AI Commons team (community team) on
Open-weight models keep getting more capable, and tools for running them on a laptop, a single GPU or a private server are much easier than they were a year ago. Yet hosted APIs are still simpler, and often cheaper once you count engineering time.
Useful things to share: - The model, hardware and serving setup you use, and what it costs to run - The tasks where a local model is good enough, and where it clearly is not - Whether data privacy, latency or cost was the real reason you moved - What maintenance surprised you after the first month
If you run models locally for real work, what made it worth the effort, or what made you go back to an API?