AI Workshop for Beginners: Private ChatGPT Experience on Your Own Computer - Running AI Locally

Ever feel uncomfortable about sharing too much personal info with ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude but still want AI’s help? Against giving Big Tech your private life on a golden platter running on wasteful resource-sucking data centers? A bit confused about some of the jargon and words used in news articles about the next most powerful AI models coming out? This workshop is for you! Earlier this year there was a breakthrough - we can now run AI that are more than capable of being private and even completely offline assistants on personal computers and laptops! This is also a workshop for AI beginners who find setting up agents with OpenClaw too intimidating but still want a capable AI experience like ChatGPT that keeps all private information on their own computers - without writing any code or running any terminal/command line commands! What we'll cover: Setting up Jan (open source ChatGPT-like interface) and running powerful open source AI models of your choosing on your own computer. Learning important concepts about running AI on your own computer - from why open source AI exists to tokens, context, model quantization, MCP tool servers, and more. Answering your questions to make sure you're confident discussing AI model concepts and the major news developments that are shaking the world. This is a hands-on workshop - bring your computer and get ready to download and install some AI! System Requirements: The more RAM your computer has, the better. It’s now possible to run near-frontier-capable-AI on computers with just 16GB of RAM. That said, even if your computer has less than that (like 8GB), you can run less powerful AI that is still impressive and are welcome to attend! To be efficient, we encourage participants to download and install Jan (https://www.jan.ai/) as well as the AI model it suggests when first running the app in advance before coming to the event. During the event, you’ll learn how to find even better AI models to replace the default Jan model with. A Google Meet link will be shared by text blast to those attending before the event begins for anyone who wants to attend remotely. About your host: Jason Stine is actually in no way related to Jan. He's just a passionate AI hobbyist who enjoys mentoring others and found that Jan was the most straightforward software for this workshop. He's a fullstack web developer (software engineer) who uses Cursor AI every day at work. About Homebrew Club: We're a community-driven coworking space where frontier technology meets raw ambition - open 24/7. A place where the next big thing is being tinkered with right now — by people just like you.