Run AI Locally on Your Mac with Ollama: Chat, Tools, RAG and a Custom Model (Real Numbers from a Mac mini M4)

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I wanted to know how far a plain Mac mini M4 with 16 GB can go with local AI. No cloud, no API key, nothing leaving the machine. So I installed Ollama and built five small projects with it: a chat app, the OpenAI SDK pointed at localhost, tool calling, RAG over my own notes, and a custom model. Everything below is from that real run. The full step-by-step video is here: What Ollama is (in one paragraph) Ollama is a small app that downloads open models (Llama, Qwen, Gemma and more) and runs them on your own computer.

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