Run open-source AI models locally
Ollama is a free, open-source tool that lets you download and run powerful AI models — Llama, Mistral, Gemma, Qwen, DeepSeek, and many more — directly on your own computer. No cloud account, no API keys, nothing leaving your hardware. It also exposes a local API that looks a lot like OpenAI's, so apps built for ChatGPT can usually point at Ollama with minimal changes.
Free, open source (MIT)
People who want to run AI models privately, offline, or without paying per token.
Your data stays yours. Nothing is sent to a company's servers — every prompt runs on your own hardware.
You're not tied to a data center. If a provider changes pricing, shuts a model off, or has an outage, you're not stuck.
Open-source AI is growing fast and for good reason. The local route is more responsible in terms of resource use and more transparent about what the model is actually doing.
Free to use. Once the model is downloaded, you can run it as much as you want at no cost.
Works offline. Useful on planes, spotty Wi-Fi, or just when you want to know your tools still work without the internet.
Smaller models run fine on most modern laptops. Larger models benefit from a GPU or Apple Silicon.
Setup is simple — install Ollama, then run something like `ollama run llama3` in your terminal.
It exposes an OpenAI-compatible API, so most apps that work with ChatGPT can be pointed at Ollama instead.
Check it out directly and form your own opinion — the best way to know if a tool works for you is to try it.
Visit Ollama