CuriousLM Blog
AI news and practical help for using private AI, choosing local models, and working offline.
About CuriousLM
A private place to think out loud, and an assistant that knows what needs you.
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How local AI works
Every answer is written on your device, so what you ask stays with you.
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Verify your privacy
Watch every request, and have an AI read the code your device runs.
Check for yourselfLocal AI vs On-Device, Offline, and Self-Hosted AI
Local, on-device, offline, private, and self-hosted AI describe different properties. This guide gives each term a precise meaning and a practical test.
Latest news
Sourced reporting on AI policy, models, security, and industry moves.
PostgreSQL 19 Slips to November After AI Review Found 40 Bugs
Percona's apology post details the delay, the AI review role, and what ships in PG20.
Meta Ships Muse Spark Open, an 816B-Parameter Open-Weight Frontier MoE
Meta calls it the most capable US open-weight model, and Apple Silicon users can already run it.
ChatGPT Ads Can Target You by Prompt, Phone Number, and Email
The custom-audience playbook arrived in your AI assistant, personalization setting or not.
Linus Torvalds Pushes a Kernel Branch Co-Written With Claude Code
The kernel's creator says the code, the tests, and the review were mostly AI-assisted.
Getty Images to File for Chapter 11 and Go Private in a $533 Million Deal
The stock-photo giant's debt restructuring arrives with generative AI compressing its market.
Google AI Edge Foresight Brings Offline Meeting Notes to the Mac
Google's local-first answer to Granola runs its transcription and summaries on Apple Silicon.
Apple Cuts iPhone 18 Pro Orders as AI Memory Costs Reach the Handset
The AI memory squeeze is no longer abstract: it is showing up in iPhone order books.
Anthropic OSS Scanner Sends Free Bug Reports to Maintainers
Maintainers can opt into faster bug reports, but they must verify each finding themselves.
Xiaomi's Own RL Environments Leaked Answers, and MiMo Wrote a Git Parser
The most detailed reward-hacking audit yet shows rules only work when they name the loophole.
StepFun's Step 5 Preview Lands on OpenRouter With Open Weights Due Oct 15
Another Chinese frontier-adjacent flagship reaches Western API gateways before its weights ship.
All guides
Clear explanations, practical checks, and primary sources.
- Offline AI on Android9 min read
Why You Should Keep an AI Model on Your Phone Before You Need It
Cloud AI depends on infrastructure you do not control. A downloaded local model gives your phone a useful capability that can remain available when connectivity or online services fail.
- Offline AI on Android9 min read
How to Install and Prepare an Offline AI PWA on Android
Installing a PWA adds the app experience, but offline AI is ready only after the shell, runtime, model, tokeniser, and local state are present and tested.
- Local documents9 min read
Text PDF vs Scanned PDF for Offline AI
A text PDF contains extractable characters. A scanned PDF may contain only page images and needs OCR before a local AI model can search or quote it reliably.
- Local AI models10 min read
Why Local AI Is Slow on a Phone and How to Diagnose It
Local AI speed has two separate parts: time before the first visible token and the rate of tokens after output begins. Diagnose them separately.
- AI privacy11 min read
Where Local AI Stores Chats, Models, and Files on Android
Local AI data is not one file in one folder. Chats, models, imported documents, indexes, caches, and backups can use different native or browser storage, with different deletion and recovery rules.
- AI privacy11 min read
Private AI Privacy Checklist: 25 Questions Before You Trust an App
Privacy labels are inconsistent. This checklist replaces slogans with questions that an AI provider should answer and tests that a careful user can repeat without uploading sensitive information.
- Local AI models10 min read
What Is AI Model Quantization for Local AI on a Phone?
Quantization can make a local model smaller and more practical, but a lower bit count is not a universal speed or quality score. Learn how precision, runtime support, memory, and task testing fit together.
- Local AI models8 min read
LFM2.5 vs Qwen3.5 for Mobile Local AI
LFM2.5 1.2B and Qwen3.5 0.8B are compact model families with different architectures, language claims, licences, and intended uses. There is no honest universal winner: compare the exact quantised artifacts in the same app, on the same phone, with your own prompts.
- Local AI models8 min read
How to Choose a Local AI Model for Android
The best local AI model for Android is not simply the largest download your phone can hold. It is the smallest compatible model that performs your actual tasks reliably while leaving enough memory, storage, and thermal headroom for the operating system and app.
- Offline AI on Android10 min read
How to Choose an Offline AI App for Android
A decision framework for choosing an Android AI app that can run a model locally, explain its network boundaries, and remain useful when connectivity disappears.
- Offline AI on Android8 min read
Offline AI in a Browser: How PWAs, WebGPU, and Local Models Work
A browser can run an AI model locally, but offline success requires more than WebGPU. The app shell, runtime, model, tokenizer, storage, and update strategy must all be available before the connection disappears.
- AI privacy10 min read
Does an AI App Send Your Prompts to a Server? How to Check
Airplane mode is useful, but it cannot prove everything about an AI app. Build a feature-by-feature data-flow map, inspect documented recipients, observe requests where practical, and test deletion before entering sensitive content.
- Local documents10 min read
How to Chat With a PDF Offline on Android
Learn how an on-device AI app extracts a locally saved PDF, retrieves relevant passages, and generates an answer without relying on hosted inference.
- Offline AI on Android9 min read
Can You Use AI in Airplane Mode? A Practical Android Guide
AI can work in airplane mode when the model and runtime are already stored on your Android device, but online search, downloads, and cloud features cannot.
- Offline AI on Android9 min read
How to Use AI Without Internet on Android
A practical guide to setting up an Android AI app before going offline, confirming that inference is local, and avoiding surprises when connectivity disappears.
- On-device AI11 min read
Local AI vs Cloud AI: Privacy, Speed, Quality, Cost and Offline Access
Local AI keeps inference on hardware you control; cloud AI uses remote computing. The better choice depends on your information, device, task, and need for current or high-capability models.
- AI privacy10 min read
Private AI Chatbots With No Account: What “Private” Actually Means
No signup is convenient, but it does not prove that an AI chat is private. This guide shows how to evaluate inference, storage, network requests, retention, deletion, and optional features before you trust an assistant.
- On-device AI8 min read
What Is On-Device AI? A Practical Guide to Private Local AI
On-device AI runs a model on your phone, tablet, or computer instead of sending every prompt to a remote inference service. That changes the privacy, offline, cost, and performance trade-offs, but it does not make every feature automatically private or offline.