Considering a Switch to Local LLMs from ChatGPT

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With the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI and growing concerns about data privacy, I’ve started thinking about moving away from ChatGPT. I’m especially interested in local LLMs that offer more control and privacy. But as a non-technical user, I’m unsure how realistic that is—and I’d really appreciate some advice from people with hands-on experience.

My biggest question is whether a local LLM can come close to the quality and functionality of models like ChatGPT, especially o3 or o4-mini. Would something like that actually run on a typical home setup, say with 8–16GB of GPU VRAM?

I also rely on features like deep research—web search, document analysis, multi-step reasoning. From what I understand, these often require external search APIs. I’m not sure how much those cost in practice, or whether they raise new privacy concerns. Would using privacy-focused engines like Brave Search or DuckDuckGo help?

Overall, I’m trying to figure out if switching to a local LLM is really possible for someone without a technical background. If you’ve gone down this path, I’d love to hear what worked for you—and what didn’t.

Thanks in advance for any insight!

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No, not really.
The model has to fully fit into VRAM or it becomes really slow.
8-16B models are still on the “pretty small” side for LLMs and will produce (considerably) worse results than online models with xxxB parameters.

To run larger models you’d need a very beefy computer for thousands of dollars.

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you aren’t going to get close to the state-of-the-art paid/premium models on your own hardware unless your own hardware is a small datacenter. BUT you can still get a really capable local LLM with a typical gaming system, a Macbook M{1,2,3,4} Pro or Max, etc. That may be on par with OpenAI’s “mini” models.

these often require external search APIs. I’m not sure how much those cost in practice

For a single home user, I believe it’s possible to set this up free of charge if you stay within the limits of a free tier.

Would using privacy-focused engines like Brave Search or DuckDuckGo help?

If you are comfortable using Brave or DDG for normal search, I don’t see why you wouldn’t trust them with your LLM searches. But it isn’t something I’ve looked deeply into.

Overall, I’m trying to figure out if switching to a local LLM is really possible for someone without a technical background.

It’s a rather technical niche at the moment (since most hobbyists are those who work in ML/AI screwing around in their free time with local LLMs), but its not too daunting if you are a somewhat technical person. Probably the easiest software to get started with would be something like LM-Studio or Jan[.]ai. Either of these options are more or less like typical consumer “apps” and you just need to load up or download the model of your choice. With 8GB of VRAM you are somewhat limited, with 16GB you have more options, with 12GB you could run a 8B or 14B model. Some of the Mixture-of-experts models (like Qwen3-30B-A3B) are pretty efficient options for consumer hardware (even without a GPU). Also note that this field changes fast what was truisms 6 mo ago are not true today, and what is true today will probably look different in 6-12 months.

Are you looking into running an LLM on your current hardware or purchasing new hardware? If this will be your current hardware, what GPU do you have, and how much systm RAM is it DDR5 or DDR4?

edit: if you are looking to see what models will work with what hardware, The huggingface community or Reddit’s r/localllama community are good starting points. Lots of good mindshare there, and a lot of knowledgeable hobbyists.

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Sorry for the late reply, and thank you so much for all the detailed information.

Are you looking into running an LLM on your current hardware or purchasing new hardware? If this will be your current hardware, what GPU do you have, and how much systm RAM is it DDR5 or DDR4?

For the time being, I plan to stick with my current PC. It has a GeForce 4070 Ti GPU and 32GB of RAM (4×8GB). The RAM is listed as DDR5-4800. I bought the machine after discussing the build with a staff member at a local PC shop, so I believe it’s a fairly typical modern gaming PC without anything too unusual in the configuration.

Thanks to everyone’s advice, I now understand that smaller models should run fine on my current setup. I’ll try following the manuals and guides for the apps and sites you mentioned to start building the environment and see how usable it is in practice. Thanks again!