A local LLM isn’t really something I planned on setting up. But after reading some of my colleagues’ experiences with setting up theirs, I wanted to give it a go myself. The privacy and offline benefits of running a large language model on your own machine are also quite appealing. I’ve actually recently used NotebookLM to help me learn the ropes of self-hosting, so I considered using it for my first local LLM setup, but went with Perplexity instead.