How to run LLMs on PC at home using Llama.cpp • The Register

Hands on Training large language models (LLMs) may require millions or even billion of dollars of infrastructure, but the fruits of that labor are often more accessible than you might think. Many recent releases, including Alibaba's Qwen 3 and OpenAI's gpt-oss, can run on even modest PC hardware.

If you really want to learn about how LLMs work, running one locally is essential. It also gives you unlimited access to a chatbot, without paying extra for priority access or sending your data to the cloud. While there are simpler tools, activating Llama.cpp at the command line provides the best performance and most options, including the ability to assign the workload to the CPU or GPU and the capability of quantizing (aka compressing) models for faster output.

Under the hood, many of the most