Finally got my first local AI model running on an old laptop I had sitting around

I went to a coffee shop downtown last weekend and overheard some guys talking about running AI stuff on cheap hardware. It clicked that I have this old ThinkPad from 2018 collecting dust in my closet. Spent Sunday afternoon tinkering and got Llama 3.2 to load up in about 4 hours of trial and error. It's slow and dumb but it works for basic text stuff without needing the internet. Has anyone else tried running models on old gear and seen any real speed tricks?

2 comments

2 Comments

rayy838d ago

Ngl I gotta disagree here. Running old hardware like that is just gonna frustrate you more than anything. Those 4 hours of trial and error would've been better spent just using a cloud service for free. The response time on a 2018 laptop is gonna be brutal - like waiting 30 seconds for a basic sentence. And forget about doing anything useful with it, the model is probably so quantized it can barely form a coherent paragraph. You're better off just using the internet for now and saving up for something with a decent GPU.

alicea268d ago

Oh man, I totally feel your pain on that trial and error grind. Getting Llama 3.2 to actually run on a 2018 ThinkPad is no small feat, even if it's slow and a bit dumb - you should be proud of that. It's a great feeling to have something that works offline, even if it takes forever to respond.