Local Models 101: Running AI on Your Laptop

We are happy to announce our next meetup that will be held physically at XM, in Athens. After the talk there will be time for Q&A, food and networking. 📍 Location 📍 Michalakopoulou 80 street, 1st floor. Attendees should register with their meetup name at the entrance ⏰ Date & Time ⏰ 24th of September, 19:00 🔗 Prerequisites & Target audience 🔗 The talk is aimed at developers and tinkerers who are interested in running LLMs locally. Some kind of ID is required for entrance to the building. 🇬🇷 Language 🇬🇧 The talk will be in Greek unless otherwise requested. 📃 Agenda 📃 18:30 - Intro, Agenda of meetup 18:35 - A message from our sponsor - XM 18:40 - "Local Models 101: Running AI on Your Laptop" by Filippos Karailanidis 19:45 - Pizza, kindly offered by XM 🍕 🎤 About the talk 🎤 You keep hearing you can run AI models on your own laptop — but which models, on what hardware, and how good are they really? This first edition of AI for Devs Athens is a hands-on primer on running LLMs locally. In 45 minutes we'll go from "what even is a local model" to knowing exactly what you can run on the machine you already own — no cloud, no API keys, no data leaving your laptop. It's a technical talk, but not a deep one: if you're a curious hobbyist you'll walk out able to download and run your first model tonight; if you're a developer you'll leave with the mental model to reason about size, memory and performance. What we'll cover: What local models are, and why you'd run one on your own machine Model size vs performance — and how to tell what your hardware can handle The tools that make it easy to get started A live demo: running a model from scratch Who it's for: developers, tinkerers and hobbyists curious about AI. No ML background needed, you can just show up. 🎤 About the speaker 🎤 Filippos Karailanidis is an AI coach at ByteRail, where he helps companies and professionals adopt AI in their processes. Behind the consulting sits 10+ years of software engineering across frontend, backend and DevOps, and 5 years leading development teams. He's enthusiastic about the AI ecosystem but still believes vibe-coding must be exercised with restraint. He co-organizes AI for Devs Athens to bring that ecosystem closer to the local developer community. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/filkaris/