How to Set Up Your Personal AI Assistance on a MacBook For Free

Whether you are a power user or a developer, AI is now in everywhere in daily life of every person. Normally, setting up an AI assistant on your laptop is not possible but with the DeepSeek-R1, it is possible. DeepSeek R1 is an ChatGPT alternative, created by a Chinese company. DeepSeek R1 use significantly less resources comparing to other LLMs. When you install a LLM locally on your laptop, you have some advantages:

1. It runs locally on your MacBook. You even don’t need an internet connection to run it.

2. Your data or chat is safe, it is not transferred to a server. It is good for you if privacy is important for you.

3. It is free. Many online AI tools are free, but there is no guarantee that it will be free forever.

Photo by Google DeepMind on Unsplash

We will use LM Studio for running the DeepSeek-R1 on Macbook. You can download LM studio from here. Then double click the dmg file and install it.

In LM Studio, click the search icon and enter discover section:

Discover screen will display all available LLM models that can be downloaded. Write deepseek in search bar:

DeepSeek R1 models will be listed. You can choose <= 8B model if you have M2/M3/M4 MacBook Pro (16GB RAM+) system requirements. The size of the model also shows its performance and computational complexity. When the size increase, its demand for system requirements also increase.

Then choose a model and click download. Once downloaded, you can click Load Model on the download completed popup.

Or you can click select a model to load button in top of the screen in chat section:

Here select the model you downloaded and click load model. Now your personal AI assistant is ready to use. Click + button and start a new chat:

You can also use these LLM models via API calls. Thats topic of another blog post.

If you liked this post, please provide a clap or like.