welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP edition of Build Applications with Local AI Models on a Mac. This book teaches you how to run a large language model (LLM) on your own computer and build a fully functional, voice-enabled AI chat application - from scratch, with no prior programming experience required.

To get the most from this book, all you need is a Mac running macOS Ventura (13) or later with at least 8 GB of RAM and 20 GB of free disk space. Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, or M4) is strongly recommended - its unified memory architecture and Neural Engine make local AI and on-device speech recognition genuinely fast - but Intel Macs can follow along too, with smaller models. You do not need any prior experience with programming, the command line, or machine learning. If you can follow step-by-step instructions, you can complete this book.