Can a potato handle running local Ai models?

Can you actually run local AI on a laptop with an Intel Core i3 7th Gen, 8GB of RAM, and absolutely no GPU? In this video, we push a "potato" laptop to its limits to find out. We tested a wide range of small and medium-sized models to see what is usable and what brings the system to a crawl. While big models were completely unusable, some surprisingly capable small models ran smoothly enough for basic tasks. 🧪 Models Tested: LFM 2.5 VL 450M (Q8) LFM 2.5 1.2B (Q8 & Q4) LFM 2.5 8B (A1B Q4) Ministral 3 (3B) Gemma 2 (E2B & E4B) Note: Assuming Gemma 2 based on context Phi-4 Mini Qwen (0.8B) 📊 The Verdict: Running local AI on old hardware is technically possible, but it is not recommended for general chatbot use given how good and free cloud-based models have become. However, these tiny models shine in one specific area: local automations. If you need a lightweight brain for background scripts or specific workflows without sending data to the cloud, an old laptop might just be the perfect dedicated machine. The music i used was this one: Music by Aria Maddison from Pixabay #ai