preface
This book began with a question I kept hearing from my students: “How do I actually run AI on my own computer?”
I have been teaching AI and programming for over sixteen years. I have watched the field evolve from a niche academic pursuit into something that touches every industry and every profession. When large language models (LLMs) became widely available in 2023, the excitement was enormous, but so was the confusion. People wanted to use AI, but they did not want to send their private data to cloud services. They wanted to understand how things worked, not just press buttons in someone else’s interface.
The turning point came when I discovered Ollama. Here was a tool that let anyone download and run a powerful AI model on their own laptop, with no cloud account, no subscription, and no programming experience required. I started showing my students how to set it up. Their reactions convinced me that this needed to be a book.
Most AI books assume you already know how to program. Most programming books assume you do not care about AI. This book assumes neither. It starts from the very beginning—opening a terminal window—and builds step by step toward a fully functional voice-enabled AI chatbot running entirely on your Mac. Every command is explained. Every concept is connected to what came before.