Local vs cloud AI

	Cloud (ChatGPT, Claude, APIs)	Local (Ollama, LM Studio)
Cost	Subscriptions + API usage	Hardware + electricity
Privacy	Data sent to provider	Stays on your machine (if offline)
Quality	Frontier models	Smaller open models; improving
Best for	Latest capabilities, mobile	Offline, experiments, learning

Start local: Ollama + a small model (phi, llama3.2, qwen).
Start cloud free tier: Google AI Studio, vendor free credits.