The 4-hour power outage in my Denver apartment is how I learned to install AI on a laptop

Riley Bell · 2026-10-21T16:05:04.089286+00:00

Last Tuesday a transformer blew near my building in Denver and we lost power for 4 hours. A neighbor knocked on my door asking if I could help set up a small AI model on his laptop since he needed it for work. He had downloaded a 7 gigabyte open source chatbot file but had no idea what to do with it. I walked him through the command line steps on my phone hotspot and his battery lasted just long enough. When it finally loaded he typed one question and got an answer in about 20 seconds, which felt slow but also kind of amazing. He said it felt like running a whole factory on a camp stove. Has anyone else tried setting up local models on a laptop like this? Curious what sizes actually run on an average machine.

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