Authored by Christopher Penn via 'Almost Timely News' substack,
I’ve been putting together a new course for Trust Insights, AI for Writing (and Writers), which will be coming out August 25th, and during the process of creating that course, I realized I’ve never walked through setting up a discount agentic AI system.
For a while now, many of us who work in “corporate” have had access to what feels like unlimited amounts of AI (though that free ride is coming to an end at enterprise shops thanks to absurdly large bills). For the average person who doesn’t have the backing of a corporation, how could we tap into the power of agentic systems without tapping out our wallets?
This tracks back to a question from Leslie in the Analytics for Marketers Slack group:
“have you done a video or post with recommendations for a cheap second computer set up someone can use to build their separate AI machine?“
So this week, let’s get scrappy.
Warnings, Disclaimers, Disclosures
If you work at a company, please check with IT before installing software willy-nilly. As a former IT professional, we thank you.
Second, in this issue I’ll be talking about Chinese-made AI models like Qwen and DeepSeek. There is a HUGE difference between a Chinese mod
