The most impor­tant thing to under­stand is the dif­fer­ence between AI that runs online and AI that runs local­ly on your PC. Online tools are easy but your data goes to their servers. Local AI gives you pri­va­cy because noth­ing ever leaves your com­put­er. It also works with­out an inter­net con­nec­tion. The trade-off is that local AI depends entire­ly on your PC’s pow­er.

Let's break this down into what you prob­a­bly want to do: run a smart chat­bot, cre­ate images, or edit videos.

Running a Chatbot or Language Model Locally

This is for when you want a pri­vate assis­tant for writ­ing, cod­ing, or just brain­storm­ing, with­out your con­ver­sa­tions being sent to a company's serv­er. To do this, you need two things: a pro­gram to run the AI, and the AI mod­el itself. Think of the pro­gram as the game con­sole, and the mod­el as the game car­tridge.

LM Stu­dio: The Eas­i­est All-in-One Option

LM Stu­dio is prob­a­bly the best start­ing point. It’s a desk­top appli­ca­tion that lets you down­load, man­age, and chat with a huge vari­ety of open-source lan­guage mod­els.

Here’s the process:
1. Go to the LM Stu­dio web­site (lmstudio.ai) and down­load the installer for Win­dows.
2. Run the installer. It’s a stan­dard set­up process, just click through it.
3. Open LM Stu­dio. The main screen has a search bar. You can search for mod­els from Hug­ging Face, which is a mas­sive library for AI mod­els.
4. Search for a mod­el. A good start­ing point is some­thing from the Mis­tral, Lla­ma, or Qwen fam­i­lies. You'll see a list of files. Look for ones with "GGUF" in the name and a "Q4_K_M" or "Q5_K_M" tag. These are quan­tized mod­els, mean­ing they are com­pressed to run on reg­u­lar com­put­ers with­out need­ing a super­com­put­er. A 7‑billion (7B) para­me­ter mod­el is a good bal­ance of per­for­mance and size.
5. Click down­load. A 7B mod­el will be a few giga­bytes, so it will take a minute.
6. Once down­loaded, click the chat icon on the left-hand side. Select your down­loaded mod­el at the top, and just start typ­ing.

That’s it. You now have a pri­vate AI chat­bot run­ning entire­ly on your PC.

A cru­cial point is hard­ware. For this to work smooth­ly, you real­ly need at least 16GB of RAM. If you have a ded­i­cat­ed graph­ics card (GPU) with at least 6–8GB of VRAM, you can offload some of the work to it, which makes the AI respond much faster. LM Stu­dio has a set­ting where you can tell it how many "lay­ers" of the mod­el to send to your GPU. Max it out if you can.

Olla­ma: A More Tech­ni­cal, But Pow­er­ful Alter­na­tive

Olla­ma does the same thing as LM Stu­dio but works from the com­mand line. It’s a bit less user-friend­­ly but it’s very pow­er­ful and uses resources effi­cient­ly.

Here's how you set it up:
1. Go to ollama.com and down­load the Win­dows installer.
2. Run the installer. It will han­dle the set­up.
3. Once installed, you don't open an app. You open the Win­dows Com­mand Prompt.
4. To get a mod­el, you just type a com­mand. For exam­ple, to get the lat­est Lla­ma 3 mod­el, you’d type ollama run llama3 and hit enter. It will down­load the mod­el and then imme­di­ate­ly open a chat ses­sion in the same win­dow.

The first time you run a mod­el it has to down­load it, but after that, the com­mand will load it instant­ly. Olla­ma runs as a back­ground ser­vice, which makes it easy for oth­er pro­grams to use your local AI.

Generating AI Art Offline

Run­ning an image gen­er­a­tor local­ly means you can cre­ate what­ev­er you want with total pri­va­cy and no fil­ters or sub­scrip­tion fees. The most pop­u­lar tool for this is Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion. But Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion itself is just the engine; you need a user inter­face (a pro­gram with but­tons and menus) to use it eas­i­ly.

Easy Dif­fu­sion: The "Just Works" Installer

For begin­ners, I rec­om­mend a pack­age called Easy Dif­fu­sion. It bun­dles Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion and a user-friend­­ly web inter­face into a sin­gle, sim­ple installer.

Here are the steps:
1. Go to the Easy Dif­fu­sion GitHub page and down­load the installer for Win­dows.
2. Run the installer. It will take a while because it has to down­load sev­er­al giga­bytes of data, includ­ing Python, var­i­ous libraries, and the main Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion mod­el. Just let it run until it's fin­ished.
3. When it's done, it will auto­mat­i­cal­ly open a web brows­er tab. This is your user inter­face. Book­mark this address.
4. To gen­er­ate an image, just type a descrip­tion (a "prompt") into the text box and click "Make."

The key hard­ware require­ment here is the graph­ics card (GPU). You need a ded­i­cat­ed NVIDIA GPU with at least 4GB of VRAM to get start­ed. 8GB or more is much bet­ter and will let you cre­ate larg­er images much faster. It will work on the CPU, but it will be incred­i­bly slow. We’re talk­ing many min­utes for a sin­gle small image.

The free­dom here is sig­nif­i­cant. You can down­load hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent fine-tuned mod­els from web­sites like Civ­i­tai. For exam­ple, you can down­load a mod­el that's specif­i­cal­ly trained to cre­ate pho­to­re­al­is­tic por­traits, or one that makes car­­toon-style art. You just place the down­loaded mod­el file (they are usu­al­ly called "check­points" or "safeten­sors") into the "mod­els" fold­er inside your Easy Dif­fu­sion instal­la­tion fold­er.

Free Software with AI Features

Not all AI soft­ware is about gen­er­at­ing things from scratch. Some of the best free cre­ative soft­ware now includes AI-pow­ered fea­tures that make dif­fi­cult tasks eas­i­er.

DaVin­ci Resolve: AI-Pow­ered Video Edit­ing

DaVin­ci Resolve is pro­fes­­sion­al-grade video edit­ing soft­ware, and its free ver­sion is sur­pris­ing­ly full-fea­­tured. Many of its AI tools, which it calls the "Neur­al Engine," are avail­able in the free down­load.

You can down­load it direct­ly from the Black­mag­ic Design web­site. The free ver­sion includes fea­tures like:
* Smart Reframe: If you have a hor­i­zon­tal video and want to make a ver­ti­cal ver­sion for social media, this fea­ture auto­mat­i­cal­ly tracks the sub­ject to keep them in the frame.
* Voice Iso­la­tion: If you have a record­ing with a lot of back­ground noise, this tool can ana­lyze the audio and specif­i­cal­ly iso­late the human voice, dra­mat­i­cal­ly clean­ing up the sound.
* Gen­er­ate Sub­ti­tles: The soft­ware can auto­mat­i­cal­ly tran­scribe the audio in your time­line and cre­ate sub­ti­tles for you.

Some of the most advanced AI fea­tures, like Mag­ic Mask (which auto­mat­i­cal­ly cuts a per­son or object out of the back­ground), do require the paid Stu­dio ver­sion. But the tools includ­ed in the free ver­sion are gen­uine­ly use­ful and can save a lot of time.

The bot­tom line is that get­ting free AI soft­ware for your PC is very pos­si­ble. For run­ning chat­bots and lan­guage mod­els local­ly, start with LM Stu­dio. For cre­at­ing art, use Easy Dif­fu­sion to get start­ed with Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion. And for prac­ti­cal cre­ative work, check out the AI fea­tures already built into pow­er­ful free pro­grams like DaVin­ci Resolve. Just make sure your PC, espe­cial­ly its RAM and GPU, is ready for the task.