Oct 2, 2026 Oct 2, 2026 2026-10-02

One of my YouTube subscribers asked, in a comment, how to set up a 16GB M1 MacBook Pro so it runs models in a more comfortable way, not necessarily in the terminal. This came as a reaction to my local models demo videos, which seem to be picking up lately. People enjoy that content, but they want something more visual to play with them.

So, I made a new video, specifically for this. Just watch it below, if you’re the visual type.

If not, read on for a detailed breakdown on how it’s done.

Setting Up The Local AI Foundation on a MacBook

The basic understanding of running local AI is that you first have to “serve” the model, and that is done usually in the terminal. After this step, you can start “consuming” the model, via a web interface, or even a desktop app.

Serving the model is done, on a mac, with an utility called mlx-serve. It’s a solid command line utility, with a lot of arguments, which sometimes may be overwhelming. But the TLDR here is that you only need to remember 2 commands:

mlx-serve run

mlx-serve serve

Depending on whether or not a model is already local, it also downloads the model on your machine. We are not using ollama or other more established binaries because mlx is specifically optimized for the Metal architecture of your Mac. Simply put, the models will run faster and with less resources.

Serving the model is already 50% of the job.

From there on, I explore 3 ways to consume this.

Using Local AI With Grok Build

Grok Build is my default CLI these days – I’m vintage, I know, and I spend 90% of my time in the terminal. I already talked about how to set up free models (both local and remote, on OpenRouter) on this post. The video is just a very short version of that.

The TLDR is that you will edit Grok’s config.toml by adding the model characteristics, and then you’re just picking the model mid-session with /models inside Grok Build. It’s not complicated, if you like staying the terminal, and, like I said, that’s my goto approach when using AI in general.

Using Local AI With OpenWeb UI

OpenWeb UI is a chat wrapper on top of the local model, but it offers a relatively rich experience. It’s very simple to install, and it will offers you a familiar, ChatGPT style interface. You can switch models or adjust the model parameters, and generally do whatever you do with a standard ChatGPT interface, only it uses a local model. Use it if you’re spending most of the time in the browser.

Using Local AI With MLX-Serve (the desktop app)

The most complex and rich experience comes from MLX-Serve, which is a notarized by Apple app, built on top of the command line utility mentioned at the beginning of this article. It is by far the nicest, most elegant way to run local AI on your machine and it has all the pre-requisites to become a more established app for day to day AI tasks. On top of the chat experience, you also get to generate images, voice (text to speech), music and even videos. There’s solid support for defining agents too, and you get recurring tasks as well.

That’s my recommendation for anyone who want to try local AI on a Mac.

All the links for the above programs are in the video, feel free to check it out.

As usual, if you like this kind of content, like, share and subscribe to my YouTube channel, you will help local AI grow.