the localhost

Five tech industry veterans, one hot seat, and a vote. In our first episode: Meta gave away a new AI model and promised the big one soon, NVIDIA's CEO used his first ever post on X to defend open weights, and 270 companies signed on. One did not. So Frank takes the hot seat to argue that openness is positional, not principled, and the crew tries to take him apart. Along the way: what open weight actually means (up to the secret sauce), the Flock camera controversy as edge AI's cautionary tale, and a job interview for five AI models on a used $700 graphics card, with a winner nobody was talking about. Plus the stat of the night: one host's router setup runs 86 percent of his AI locally and has already saved him $1,600.

We run the models, test the claims, and share what actually happened, including our own mistakes. New episodes weekly.

There's no place like 127.0.0.1.

00:00 Cold open: from cost to control
00:55 Meet the hosts (and who writes the paychecks)
03:00 The Rundown: Qwen 3.8 lands
06:00 Open weight vs open source, explained
13:00 Flock cameras: edge capture, central control
16:00 This week's Tension: open is a position
20:00 The debate: manifestos, chess games, and IPOs
28:00 The vote
31:00 On My Device: five models walk into a job interview
34:00 What's running on the crew's devices (the 86% stat)
39:00 Wrap: there's no place like 127.0.0.1

Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto, "The Future Is for Everyone": https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/
The Open Weights letter coverage and Spark 1.2 status: https://www.orcarouter.ai/blog/meta-muse-spark-1-2-explained
Glimmer launch coverage: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/10/meta-muse-glimmer-open-weight-ai.html
The May "not suitable for open sourcing" quote: https://www.implicator.ai/meta-releases-30b-open-weight-muse-glimmer-and-promises-spark-1-2-weights/
Flock's announced changes: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/flock-safety-police-abuse-oversight-data-retention-rcna592217
Qwen 3.8-27B: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B
The 2.4T open release: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B
Frank's full benchmark, raw traces and all: https://github.com/frankcx1/bakeoff
The results post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/frankjbuchholz_on-monday-meta-gave-away-a-brand-new-ai-share-7493881833236123648-1kd1/

the localhost is five friends talking about AI on your own hardware:
Frank Buchholz (independent), Jacob Rhoades, Robert Henry, Neil Misak, and Chauncey Larsen (Microsoft, opinions their own).
The show is independent and unsponsored.

Find us at https://thelocalhost.show