That said, you might be surprised to learn that some of the models from 3b-9b could probably replace 80% of the things nonvibe coders use chatgpt for.
Its a good idea to run small models locally if your computer can host them for privacy and cash saving reasons. But how can you trust Google to autoinstall one on your machine in 2026? I just couldn't do it.
We can be positive the entire motivation of Chrome is user behavior surveillance. There's not a nano-chance in all the multiverses that Chrome model is doing anything privately. They've gone to extraordinary length to accomplish this. It's not for free.
What did we expect when they dropped "don't be evil" from their company values?
Not happy about that as I would like to see more local models but that's the current state of things.
https://sendcheckit.com/blog/ai-powered-subject-line-alterna...
Would you be able to compare this to other local models in it's class and a above that would fit consumer-grade hardware?
I find it works fine for simple classification, translation, interpretation of images & audio. It can write longer prose, but it's pretty bad.
It can also write text in the format of a JSON schema or regexp for anything you might want to do with structured data.