A neighbor's guide to running local AI models
Honest guides to the models our neighbors are actually running locally. Real hardware numbers, real gotchas, and the exact HiveBear commands to get each one going on your own hive.
Llama 3 70B
Llama 3 70B is Meta's flagship open-weight model — one of the best general-purpose local LLMs you can run at home if you have the hardware for it. The catch has always been 'if you have the hardware for it.' At 70 billion parameters, it needs serious memory. That's exactly the gap HiveBear was built for: instead of telling you to buy a $3,000 GPU, the hive lets you pool what you've got with what your neighbors have and run it together.
Llama 3 8B
Llama 3 8B is the model most people should try first. It's small enough to run on almost any laptop from the last five years, capable enough to feel genuinely useful, and free to download. If you're new to local AI, this is the one.
DeepSeek R1
DeepSeek R1 is the model that made a lot of people take local reasoning seriously. The full 671B mixture-of-experts version is out of reach for most home setups, but the distilled variants (R1-Distill-Llama-70B, R1-Distill-Qwen-32B, smaller variants too) are completely runnable on everyday hardware — especially with the hive behind you.
Qwen 2.5 72B
Qwen 2.5 72B from Alibaba is one of the strongest open-weight models right now, especially for multilingual tasks and code. Size-wise it's in the same ballpark as Llama 3 70B, so the same 'too big for one machine' math applies — and the same hive fix.
Mistral 7B
Mistral 7B is one of the most quietly excellent local LLMs out there. Small enough to run on almost anything, trained on a different data mix from Llama, and often a better fit for European languages. A classic 'just works' model.
Missing the model you're looking for?
The hive supports thousands of Hugging Face GGUF models out of the box — not just the ones we've written guides for. Run hivebear models search to browse, or let the profiler pick one that fits your hardware. Want us to write a neighbor's guide for a specific model? Drop it in the Discord.
