Before I attempted, I had no idea. I hadn't ran any AI models locally and I don't follow this stuff too closely, so I wasn't even sure if I could get something usable on my M1 MacBook Air. I went in fairly blind which is why the Ollama Docker installer was so appealing to me–I got to hold off fighting Python and Homebrew until I had a better sense of what the tool could provide.

After my attempt, I think chat is performant enough on my M1. Code gen was too slow for me. Image generation was 1-2 minutes for small pixel art sprites, which for my use case is fine to let churn for a while, but the image generation results were much worse than ChatGPT browser gives me out of the box. I do not know if poor image quality is due to machine constraints or me not understanding how to configure the checkpoint and models.

I would be interested to hear how an M3 or M4 Mini handles these things as those are fair affordable to pick up used.