LM Studio for Mac

LM Studio is a powerful, user-friendly desktop application designed for discovering, downloading, and running Large Language Models (LLMs) locally on your own computer. It is widely considered one of the best tools for interacting with open-source AI models without needing a cloud subscription or an internet connection.

You can find it at the official website: lmstudio.ai

Key Features

• Privacy & Offline Access: All data stays on your machine. Since the models run locally, your conversations are never uploaded to the cloud, making it ideal for handling sensitive information.
• Intuitive Chat Interface: It provides a "ChatGPT-like" experience for open-source models (such as Llama 3.2, Mistral, Gemma, and Phi) with a clean, professional GUI.
• Model Discovery: Includes a built-in search tool connected to Hugging Face, allowing you to easily browse and download thousands of model variants (specifically in GGUF format).
• Hardware Acceleration: Automatically detects your hardware and supports GPU offloading (NVIDIA, AMD, and Apple Silicon) to ensure fast inference speeds.
• Local API Server: It can host a local HTTP server that is compatible with the OpenAI API format. This allows developers to use LM Studio as a drop-in replacement for OpenAI in their own apps and scripts.
• Multi-Model Sessions: Ability to load multiple models simultaneously for comparison or specialized tasks.
• Vision Support: Latest versions support vision-capable models, allowing you to "chat" with images locally.
• Advanced Controls: Users can fine-tune system prompts, temperature, context length, and GPU layer distribution to optimize performance for your specific hardware.