Vitalik Buterin's Local AI Push: Can Your Laptop Replace ChatGPT?

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says local artificial intelligence (AI) is close to handling a large share of everyday tasks. He ran Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on his own laptop and posted the speed results. Unlike ChatGPT, that setup never contacts a cloud server.

The model sits on the machine, and the machine answers the request by itself. Vitalik Buterin’s Local AI Test Shows Usable Speed His laptop uses AMD’s Strix Halo chip.

Most computers split the work between a processor and a separate graphics card, and each one keeps its own pool of memory. Strix Halo puts both on a single piece of silicon and lets them share one pool instead.

That design matters because an AI model has to fit into memory before it can run at all. A typical graphics card offers 8 to 24 gigabytes, far too little for a model of this size. Strix Halo machines ship with as much as 128 gigabytes that either half of the chip can use.