Home AI Server
This post is an excerpt/cross-post from a blog post on Zettelwirtschaft April 28th, 2025 I finally gave in to my long coveting of the cylindrical Mac Pro. I bought one on eBay for $69, upgraded it to 12 cores and 128gb of ram and spun up a home AI server. I named it Jai. You can interact with him just like ChatGPT or Claude or whatever via a chat interface. image from ebay somewhere I am slightly obsessed with this computer; it’s so elegant. A silent steel canister, breathing warm air when he’s thinking. It feels like the egg of Hal 9000 or the warp core of a spaceship. Local AI A lot of the ills of the AI boom can be remedied by running an AI server at home. The energy consumption is way lower and during the winter it heats our home. There’s no data harvesting, all our queries stay in-house. We can run uncensored models, not limited by what CEOs think it’s ok to talk to AI about. And other than the hardware and electricity cost, it’s free! I love how many different models there are to play around with and how easy it is to swap them in. I still use Claude and Cursor but any que
