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I have a pretty dim view of LLMs.
Simply using an AI that's run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.
Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEO's who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.
I'm wary of the potential effects of AI usage resulting in declining or stagnating critical thinking based on some preliminary studies (example 1, example 2).
I do not think LLM's can be "just a tool" as many claim.
99% of LLM's (the ones virtually everyone use) are trained on copyrighted code that is incompatible with GPL licensed projects. LLM's have a 3 to 10% chance to unknowingly reproduce the copyrighted code perfectly, introducing legal plagiarism into an open-source project, which could easily open up the developers to being sued in the future if companies scanned open source repos for copyright violations.
Many courts are ruling that LLM generated code cannot be copyrighted at all, meaning that it also cannot be legally made GPL, losing the protections from corporate exploration the GPL normally grants. https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html
Honestly, using local LLMs on my own computer made the point of how harmful they are hit way more. I got Google's Gemma and ran it on my own hardware and this thing made my poor laptop cry.
Thing is, my specs are really good. Again, my laptop is a beast and it ran like 100% CPU, 100% GPU, and 100% of my 64gb of DDR5 Ram! Seeing it and how hot it made my computer did make me think like... it's one thing to say these are bad for the environment and another to see how demanding this technology is.
And as for it making people stupid? Yeah, it does. A lot of my coworkers who got into using AI can't even write up an email without using AI. I even caught my boss asking Gemini for assistance in budgeting and like bro, you have been doing this for years! You cant budget without AI? What are you, a smooth sloperator?
Local llm usage depends on your VRAM, your GPU. It sounds like you tried to run a model your laptop can't handle. If you also need your RAM, then it is going to be super slow no matter what. The number each model has is important to determine if your GPU can handle it, also the quantization. If you run something significantly smaller like 2B* rather than say gemma 31B, then a laptop might be able to handle it. Your laptop is not a beast (for LLM usage) unless it has more than 24 GB of VRAM on it so don't assume you can run any model on it. Look for smaller numbers with quantization. Running a local llm for me on my desktop is similar to running a video game, it doesn't slow to a crawl or cause 100% on CPU or RAM because only the VRAM is touched.
*or 4B even, just depends on your GPU