confidently tell you that computers are made of bees? or give you directions on how to tie a noose?

I’ll try and simplify it for you, I hope you don’t mind an incoming wall of text because there’s a lot to unpack. Ollama is service you can run on your local machine that will run AI models on your GPU’s VRAM (preferably for speed) or your CPU (for any parts that are too large and won’t fit on your GPU). It has its own commandline and web UI but they’re both horribly basic, they’re enough to get a taste but ollama’s key feature is that it also provides an OpenAI-compatible API that almost any other “AI” applications can connect to and use. So it serves as like the central service for your AI models, and it’s one of the easiest to manage for a novice. You can just point any other software (OpenWebUI is a popular choice, Jan AI is a little easier to install as it’s designed to run locally) at http://localhost:11434/ when it asks and it will work with any of your local ollama models and they will run completely on your own hardware. Ollama is not technically the best, it’s got some issues and some capability gaps, but it’s the easiest way to get started and get your feet wet. Eventually you might start to understand that there are other ways to run a model more efficiently but they require a bit more knowledge of the process.

Ollama has its own built in repository and “cloud” for larger models, it’s got the basics but I don’t really recommend it too much. You can freely download thousands of different models from huggingface.co that are quantized small enough to run on consumer hardware (GGUF is the format you should look for and Q4 is a common quantization target for models in billions or tens of billions of parameters). They even have a filter to limit it to the number of “billions” of parameters that are likely to be runnable on your hardware, and they have buttons to provide the command-line to download each model with ollama automatically. They’ll let you sort by trending models so you are actually looking at the ones the community is most interested in these days, typically Qwen-based or Gemma-based and then many of them retrained on output from Mythos/Fable. Almost all the models on there (trending or not) will typically have little to no censorship. Keywords to look for are ‘uncensored’, ‘unrestricted’, ‘abliterated’, ‘heretic’, but really in a lot of cases it has become redundant to even mention it, it’s almost assumed, and it’s also not even really needed. Even if the model does “refuse” your request, there’s nothing it can do about it to prevent you from rephrasing or retrying or insisting until it gives in, but that’s annoying so most of the time people try to remove those sorts of refusal behaviors. As long as it’s running on your own hardware through ollama, it’s not going to block your account or report you to the police, it doesn’t even have that capability.

A model is just a text generator. It doesn’t do ANYTHING beyond that on its own. Executable commands only happen using what’s called a “harness” (claude code is the most popular commercial one, similar open source options include opencode and pi-mono and openhermes) which detect certain formats of text the model creates and decide whether to actually execute what the model’s requesting or not. There are also protocols like MCP which is supposed to “teach” the AI what commands it can use even if it wasn’t originally trained on them, which helps with more specialized tasks.

You’ll eventually notice a few common names while browsing on huggingface.co: The big companies are all there but for legal reasons they’re not going to release even their open models without obnoxious safety guardrails. The Chinese companies (Qwen, Deepseek) are generally less restrictive. HauhauCS and huihui-ai exclusively produce uncensored models. DavidAU creates a large number of really… interesting models, also exclusively uncensored. There are uncensored coding and penetration testing models too, I think Ornith and Dolphin are some interesting ones although I don’t work much in those spheres personally.

I’m not a big fan of “AI”, I think it’s been intentionally designed to be “convincing” instead of “right” or “good” and then wildly oversold to the many stupid or naive people it has convinced, but I think the fundamental technology is interesting to play with and the democratization of it is important. I don’t think you are too old for it, but if you are questioning and standoffish from it I think that’s healthy. It doesn’t mean it’s completely useless though, and I think there is some value worth having access to and some understanding of the technology goes a long way. I don’t think it is going to “replace” any creative process, but I think it is a tool that can be useful if you know how and when to wield it.

The location of the One Piece, of course!