AI tools and resources

Curated and current: the tools worth knowing, and material that goes deeper than the book.

Local & open sourceFreemium

Hugging Face

The largest hub for open-weight models, datasets and demo apps (Spaces), plus paid inference and training infrastructure. The default place to find and download open models before running them locally.

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Local & open sourceOpen source

Llama (Meta)

Meta's family of open-weight language models, downloadable and runnable locally or via cloud providers, widely used as the base for fine-tuned and local chatbots. Free for most organizations under Meta's community license.

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Local & open sourceFree

LM Studio

Desktop app with a chat interface and local API server for running open-weight models on your own computer, aimed at people who want a graphical alternative to Ollama's command line. Free to use, closed source.

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Local & open sourceOpen source

Ollama

Command-line tool for downloading and running open-weight language models locally on your own machine, with a simple model registry and an OpenAI-compatible local API. Free and open source.

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Local & open sourceOpen source

Stable Diffusion (Stability AI)

Open-weight image generation model family that can run locally via free tools like ComfyUI, or through Stability AI's paid API. Older versions (SDXL) are fully open; newer ones require an enterprise license above $1M annual revenue.

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