I found out a $40 open source model runs on my old laptop with 8GB of RAM and I did not believe the blog post at first

Laura Shah · 2026-10-15T21:05:03.878048+00:00

I was reading a blog post last Tuesday from a guy in Bangalore who showed a quantized 7B model running on a five year old ThinkPad with no GPU at all, just 8GB of RAM and a custom loader. I tried it myself the next night and the thing answered my test questions in about 3 seconds each, which blew my mind compared to the cloud tools I was paying $20 a month for. Is anyone here running local models on old hardware, and if so what setups have worked for you?

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I found out a $40 open source model runs on my old laptop with 8GB of RAM and I did not believe the blog post at first | AI Innovations - SMM Buzz