

Depends on your definition of “good-ish”. Do you mean:
- performance/accuracy?
- ethical origin?
- ethical ongoing operation?
- privacy/future data harvesting concerns?
Running one locally on your own hardware would likely reach “good-ish” with some sacrifices against performance/accuracy (unless you’ve got a lot of expensive hardware to run very large models). As far as ethical origins, there are few small models trained on public domain/nonstolen content, but their functions are far more limited.


Ethics are subjective. “Good-ish” to you may mean you’re fine if its trained on copyrighted works as long as it wasn’t done with electricity from diesel generators belching exhaust into the local Memphis atmosphere (I’m looking at you Grok). Llama doesn’t do the diesel generator thing, but its a product of Facebook corporation. So is that “good-ish” to you or not? I don’t know. That’s up to you.
It may not be fast, but your i3 laptop with 12GB of system RAM can absolutely run a local LLM. This is where that “performance/accuracy” question I raised comes in. It won’t be very fast, and you won’t be able to run the most common large models like GPT-5 etc. However, if your needs are light, light models exist. Give this a read