Ollama
Run a capable open model on your own laptop with a single command. The friction it removes is the whole product.
Local inference used to mean a weekend of CUDA versions, quantisation flags, and serving code. Ollama collapses that into one command — it fetches the model, picks sane defaults, exposes a clean API, and you're talking to a model that never leaves your machine.
The friction it removes is the whole product.
That simplicity is why it's become the default on-ramp for local AI. It isn't the fastest or most configurable option, but it gets a non-specialist from zero to running in two minutes — and defaults that good reshape who gets to participate.
Pair it with a small modern model and an ordinary laptop becomes genuinely useful offline: private, free at the margin, and yours.
Whoever owns the easiest path to local inference shapes how a lot of people run AI — privately, off the big providers. Plumbing, but the kind that decides the map.