This week, I installed my own private AI on my Mac. It’s a thing you can do!
And, as you’ll discover if you read on, it’s also a thing you can uninstall.
I didn’t have a very clear idea what I was doing it for, but several things were floating around in my head. For a start, I wanted to try using an AI that would not at the same time be sending back to HQ everything I typed into it.
I mean, if you ever type anything you care about, you’re giving away a lot of information to tech companies that haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory, privacy-wise. And if you type something you don’t care about, you’re wasting your time.
This was prompted, in part, by the need to prepare my accounts. As with so much else, I’m bringing everything back into my own control, and using a simple open-source accounting system to manage all the numbers in my computer’s Terminal. I’m a bit rusty on Terminal commands, so I’ve been seeking help from various commercial AIs.
This became tiresome because every time I wanted to share something I would first need to remove anything confidential (about me or about counterparts in transactions). So I thought: what if I had my own AI, on my own computer, not on the cloud? I could turn off all internet access and be sure that nothing confidential got out.
If I had typed this even just a few years ago, I’d have worried about sounding like a suspicious nutcase, but hey, times have changed and privacy concerns are real. Here’s a quote about using AI from one of the key people at Tinfoil1:
the only reason we hesitate, is that we understand on some level, the terms of the bargain. The entity on the other side is not alone. You lay yourself bare while someone else records. AI is becoming the infrastructure that is always on, always helpful, yet always watching. Whoever owns the infrastructure of intelligence has power over the people who engage with it.
And the valuable stuff that is lost isn’t only specific data (how much I spent on this, what I earned from that) but the creative spirit itself:
AI is slowly becoming a panopticon. We think differently under the panopticon. We stop communicating freely, even with ourselves. We feel like everything can be observed, examined, deconstructed. We stop exploring and start performing. We edit our thoughts. We lose the magic and space we had for exploration.
See why I wanted my own private AI?
Another inspiration was a talk I stumbled across – via a blog I trust – by someone well known in the music industry. I’d never heard of him, and I’m not much of a YouTube viewer, but he clearly has a large following there. His argument stuck with me: that AI will shift from the cloud to domestic installations, just as music production shifted from large, expensive recording studios to recording at home on a desktop computer. Whether he’s right or not, the idea made me want to find out what it would actually feel like.
So there we are: the inspiration.
It didn’t take long to find guidance on how to do it, and honestly it wasn’t complicated. I chose a model suited to my Mac’s modest specifications – 8GB of RAM is not ideal for this kind of thing – and after a couple of Terminal commands it was up and running. I started talking to it.
Next time: what it was actually like – and why it didn’t last.
1 Tinfoil. https://tanyaverma.sh/2026/04/10/closing-of-the-frontier.html
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