Glossary › AI Computing › LLM

What is an LLM? (Large Language Model)

An LLM is the type of AI behind assistants like ChatGPT and Claude — a model trained on vast amounts of text that can write, summarise, code and answer questions.

Running LLMs on your own PC

Open models like Llama, Mistral, Qwen and Gemma can run locally on your own machine using free tools like Ollama or LM Studio — completely private, no subscription, works offline. Model “size” is measured in parameters (7B, 13B, 70B) — bigger is smarter but needs more VRAM.

What hardware do you need?

An 8GB NVIDIA GPU runs 7B–8B models well — that’s our $950 entry AI build. 12GB handles 13B models; 16GB runs larger quantised models. NVIDIA cards are strongly preferred because most AI tooling is built on CUDA.

Related terms

VRAMCUDAGPU