Playing with LLMs locally

June 1, 2025

Playing with LLMs locally # After a talk by Nick Burch at Berlin Buzzwords I finally got started playing with LLMs locally. The easiest way to get started for me: llm tool by Simon Willison :) Backstory # Back when it came out in winter 2022 I started playing around with ChatGPT - mostly to generate texts from individual terms given as what teachers in German primary schools call “learning words” - usually they are handed out for pupils to get prepared for a dictation (written to check spelling skills): It’s a lot more fun to prepare for theses tests with fun texts than with mere lists of words :) Back then the results were impressive - but also frightning given the implications for ease of generating mis-information, fake social media profiles, spamming search indeces and more. ...