We're led to believe that running AI locally on a PC needs some kind of beefed-up hardware. That's partly true, but as with gaming, it's a sliding scale. You can play many of the same games on a Steam Deck as you can on a PC with an RTX 5090 inside. The experience is not the same, but what matters is that you can play.
That's also true of dabbling with local AI tools, such as running LLMs using something like Ollama. While a beefcake GPU with lashings of VRAM is ideal, it's not absolutely essential.
