Wellesley Cove Group
Myth 1 – “Local models aren’t good enough.”
Fact: Open-source models have advanced rapidly. Llama-3, Gemma-7B, and Mistral Large now offer performance that rivals major cloud APIs—especially after task-specific fine-tuning. In enterprise settings, these models can achieve nearly identical quality in summarization, classification, and Q&A tasks without requiring public-cloud exposure.
Myth 2 – “Hardware will cost a fortune.”
Fact: With modern consumer-grade GPUs or Apple Silicon machines, you can run powerful models for a fraction of what cloud usage costs over time. Many organizations recoup their hardware investment in weeks, not years, especially when inference is frequent or continuous.
Myth 3 – “Going local is too complex.”
Fact: Deploying a local LLM no longer requires deep ML ops. Tools like Ollama and LM Studio provide one-click setups, and containerized solutions come with built-in access control, logging, and fine-tuning pipelines. For most use cases, you can get started in an afternoon.
Myth 4 – “Local means isolated.”
Fact: Local doesn’t mean disconnected. You can still hook into your data ecosystem using RAG pipelines. LangChain, LlamaIndex, and Semantic Kernel let your models retrieve and reason over live data from document repositories, enterprise wikis, and SQL databases—securely and without vendor lock-in.
Myth 5 – “We’ll fall behind the fast-moving cloud.”
Fact: The opposite is often true. With a local setup, you can upgrade models on your own timeline. When Llama-4, Mixtral-8x22B, or a new fine-tuned checkpoint drops, you don’t have to wait for a vendor to support it—you just switch binaries and go.
When local wins
Ask yourself:
Do we handle regulated or high‑value data?
Do we need predictable cost at high volume?
Do we require millisecond response times?
Do we want freedom to swap models at will?
If you answered yes to two or more, a pilot is worth running.
Bottom line
Local LLMs have gone mainstream; the myths haven’t caught up. Teams that update their mental model will gain both compliance and competitive edge.
Interested to learn more? Ask us about our 30‑day pilot program—designed to get you up and running quickly with no cloud dependencies.