If you had a $2500ish budget for hardware, what types of models could you run locally? If $2500 isn't really enough, what would it take?

Are there any tutorials you can recommend for somebody interested in getting something running locally?

This is where you'd start for local: https://ollama.com/

You can, almost, convert the number of nodes to gb of memory needed. For example, Deepseek-r1:7b needs about 7gb of memory to run locally.

Context window matters, the more context you need, the more memory you'll need.

If you are looking for AI devices at $2500, you'll probably want something like this [1]. A unified memory architecture (which will mean LPDDR5) will give you the most memory for the least amount of money to play with AI models.

[1] https://frame.work/products/desktop-diy-amd-aimax300/configu...

I bought a Mac Mini M2Pro 32G 18 months ago for $1900. It is sufficient to run good up to and including 40B local models that are quantized.

When local models don’t cut it, I like Gemini 2.5 flash/pro and gemini-cli.

There are a lot of good options for commercial APIs and for running local models. I suggest choosing a good local and a good commercial API, and spend more time building things than frequently trying to evaluate all the options.

I would purchase [2] used 3090's as close to $600 as you can. The 3090 still remains the price-performance king.

the local side of things with an $7,000 - $10,000 machine (512gb fast memory, cpu and disk) can almost reach parity with regard to text input and output and 'reasoning', but lags far behind for multimodal anything: audio input, voice output, image input, image output, document input.

there are no out the box solutions to run a fleet of models simultaneously or containerized either

so the closed source solutions in the cloud are light years ahead and its been this way for 15 months now, no signs of stopping

Kimi and deepseek are the only models that don't feel like a large downgrade from the typical providers.

you can run ollama stuff with just a decent cpu for some of them