Running LLMs Locally in 2026: Benefits, Trade-offs, and How to Start

Local LLM inference now matches mid-tier cloud APIs on coding and reasoning benchmarks, with consumer GPUs handling 70B-parameter models. Tools like Ollama simplify deployment, offering privacy, cost savings at scale, and no rate limits. Trade-offs include upfront hardware costs and a still-narrowing gap with top proprietary models on hard reasoning tasks.