Our guest is Mike McGinley, a Surface device specialist who sells to some of the largest banks in the world. He also got stopped on Fifth Avenue by a casting director who was looking for, and we quote, an older heavier set Irish retired New York City police officer. He is now in a Paramount+ miniseries. He has a SAG card. He was in roughly 50 commercials as a kid, including one for a Pogo Ball. We have the footage.

Somewhere in between the costumes we actually did the show. Jacob is back from GitHub Universe where they had a DGX Station with 748 gigabytes of memory pushing 19 million tokens of context. Neil talks about wiring up Boeing airplane parts with Raspberry Pis in college and building a restaurant that set its prices based on whether the Cubs were in town. Frank found a company putting fire-detecting AI on tiny sensors in the forest. Chauncey found a robot duck. And the 128GB RTX Spark SKUs are already sold out.

The thread running through all of it: the T-shirt sizes keep getting bigger on both ends. A phone doing transcription on one side, a $100,000 edge server running trillion parameter models on the other, and the same question underneath. Where should the intelligence actually live?

Plus a demo of Ride Edge, Frank's app that reads 23 API feeds and tells him where to park his car to find Uber riders. Yes, it runs on the workstation behind him. Yes, he hijacked his own podcast to show it.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open: from sensors to servers
0:50 Halloween edition, and nobody knows who they are
5:00 Meet Mike McGinley
6:00 The casting director on Fifth Avenue
8:00 A SAG card, 50 commercials, and the Pogo Ball
10:00 Relationship selling when every dollar gets scrutinized
13:00 Beyond cost savings: why banks actually want local
15:00 Jacob returns from GitHub Universe
16:00 748GB and 19 million tokens of context
17:00 The 128GB Sparks are sold out
18:00 Sam Altman thinks your DRAM is selfish
18:30 Tiny sensors that spot forest fires
19:00 Flock cameras, again
20:00 Boeing parts, Raspberry Pis, and the restaurant of the future
22:00 Why always-on workloads break the token model
23:00 DEMO: Ride Edge, 23 API feeds, one workstation
26:00 Proving the device pays for itself
27:00 Retail branches and shelf restocking
28:00 The Pixel deal that paid for the phones in weeks
31:00 MicroDuck, and open sourcing a robot
33:00 Finding weld spatter on a car body, locally
35:00 You can't put a price tag on innovation
37:00 Bank of New York builds its own colo
39:00 T-shirt sizes get an XXL
40:00 From "we won't touch DeepSeek" to "we prefer Qwen"
42:00 Neil's offline PowerPoint generator at 35,000 feet
43:00 Around the horn: what everyone's working on
47:00 Snapdragon X2 vs RTX Spark
49:00 Yarr

ABOUT THE SHOW
the localhost is an ongoing podcast about AI that runs on your own hardware. Open weight models, NPUs, workstations, sensors, home labs, and the question underneath all of it: who controls intelligence, you or a data center?

The crew: Chauncey Larsen and Jacob Rhoades of the Microsoft Surface Marketing team. Neil Misak of the Microsoft Surface Engineering AI Solution Factory. Robert Henry, Windows specialist, and not a salesman, as we have now been told. And Frank Buchholz, retired tech guy, now vibe coding, Uber driving, and unapologetic Chappell Roan and Phoebe Bridgers fan.

This week's guest: Mike McGinley, Surface device specialist, Bergen County's finest, and soon to be on your television.

DISCLOSURE
All opinions expressed on this show belong to the individual hosts and do not represent the views or positions of Microsoft or any other organization. We speak for ourselves and nobody else.

New episodes weekly.
https://thelocalhost.show

Cloud AI keeps getting cheaper. AI hardware keeps getting more expensive. And somehow the workstation is back.

This week: 400 people lined up at a Best Buy in San Francisco to buy RTX Spark devices, a company burned six figures in tokens building an ERP platform they had already licensed, and the crew tries to work out what is actually pulling people back toward expensive hardware they spent a decade being told they didn't need.

Plus the best argument anyone made for buying one: when you're running on a meter, your behavior changes. You play it safe. Take the meter away and you try the weird ideas. One developer called it the right to fail cheaply.

Chauncey is in Mexico. Scott Slater is in New York.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open: who buys a $6,000 AI laptop?
0:42 Around the horn: where everybody's been
4:55 Scott Slater joins from New York
5:25 What customers are actually asking about AI on device
7:09 The Linus Tech Tips problem
10:41 You're not buying tokens, you're buying freedom
11:50 The cost of lost experimentation
12:46 "The right to fail cheaply"
13:12 Cloud overspend dwarfs the price of RAM
13:54 What happens when every seller can build software
16:32 The $100,000 ERP nobody needed
17:55 The return of the workstation
21:46 So what's actually moving the needle?
22:47 Hybrid intelligence: the AI you never notice
25:11 will.i.am's 200 students and their Spark devices
26:35 Robert's hybrid intelligence blog
27:26 Keeping your intelligence: IP protection and the second wave
29:25 Why a JPEG is good enough
31:03 Models checking models
33:15 Nemotron, or "the new Transformers model"
34:01 On my device: 23 API feeds and an Uber app
36:53 An RTX Spark... in a car?
39:09 The $100,000 DGX Station question
41:41 Wrap: there's no place like 127.0.0.1

ABOUT THE SHOW
the localhost is an ongoing podcast about AI that runs on your own hardware. Open weight models, NPUs, workstations, home labs, and the question underneath all of it: who controls intelligence, you or a data center?

The crew: Chauncey Larsen and Jacob Rhoades of the Microsoft Surface Marketing team. Neil Misak of the Microsoft Surface Engineering AI Solution Factory. Robert Henry, Windows AI Solution Sales specialist. And Frank Buchholz, retired tech guy, now vibe coding, Uber driving, and unapologetic Chappell Roan and Phoebe Bridgers fan.

This week we're lucky to have Scott Slater stepping in for Chauncey. Scott is a Managing Director in Windows Solution Sales.

DISCLOSURE
All opinions expressed on this show belong to the individual hosts and do not represent the views or positions of Microsoft or any other organization. We speak for ourselves and nobody else.

New episodes weekly.
https://thelocalhost.show

Introducing FAQ Around and Find Out: Frank Asks Questions. Can a defense contractor who won't send IP to the cloud finally use AI? What is an Execution Container in plain English? Why buy a Surface Laptop Ultra instead of a Mac full of unified memory? Is the NPU dead now that the GPU is back? And why did an analyst upgrade the stock the same week Microsoft made local inference free?

In this episode:
- Hybrid intelligence: on the device, in your data center, or in the cloud, under one set of rules
- Execution Containers (MXC): bowling-alley bumpers for agents, now GA and cross-platform
- Hydro Fusion: GitHub Copilot routes coding work to a local model automatically
- Copilot on Windows vs GitHub Copilot vs Codex vs the CLI, untangled
- Agent 365: identity and audit for agents, because agents are outnumbering employees
- Surface Laptop Ultra vs Mac: Apple has the wider memory highway, NVIDIA makes the cars smaller
- The NPU question: more important than ever, just less of a headline
- "What's the catch?" How free local inference becomes an E7 story

Chapters:
00:00 Cold open
00:50 Intros
03:15 Hybrid intelligence comes full circle
05:30 FAQ Around and Find Out
06:00 Can a defense contractor use AI now?
08:06 Execution Containers, explained
10:51 MXC goes GA, Hydro Fusion routes local
13:12 Copilot vs GitHub Copilot vs Codex
17:03 Which announcement would you build on?
18:24 Agent 365
21:35 Surface Laptop Ultra vs Mac Mini
24:29 FP4, speculative decoding, and memory bandwidth
28:19 Does a claims adjuster care what it's called?
30:30 Who pays $7,000 for a laptop?
33:47 Is the NPU still relevant?
38:19 Why did the stock go up?
41:12 What's the catch? E7 for the win
42:36 Wrap

Hosts: Frank Buchholz, Chauncey Larsen, Jacob Rhoades, Robert Henry, and Neil Misak. Chauncey, Jacob, Robert, and Neil work at Microsoft. Everything here is personal opinion, not their employer's.

the localhost is a weekly podcast about local AI: running models on your own hardware, with your own data. No cloud required. 127.0.0.1. There's no place like home.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@thelocalhost-show
Everything else: https://thelocalhost.show

A listener (a Microsoft MVP, no less) told us he loves the show but doesn't understand all of it. Fair. So this week we go back to the studs and build local AI from the silicon up, one layer at a time, with zero jargon left unexplained. Head chefs, movie players, mixing boards, open-book tests. If you can follow a kitchen, you can follow this.

What you'll learn:
- Why memory, not the chip, decides which AI models your laptop can run
- CPU vs GPU vs NPU, explained with a restaurant kitchen
- What a model actually is (spoiler: it's just a file)
- What "8 billion parameters" really means
- Mixture of Experts, and why it fits like a big model but runs like a small one
- Context windows, tokens, and why the model "forgets" you
- MCP, agents, and why the app matters more than you think
- Robert's closet full of old Surface laptops now running as one AI cluster with NVIDIA PAIR

Chapters
00:00 Cold open: the comment that started it
00:50 Intros (from a Sprinter van in Iowa)
02:26 The stack: five layers, all on your machine
03:20 Layer 1: Silicon. Head chef, prep cooks, and the food processor
08:50 Layer 2: Runtime. The VLC for AI
11:04 NVIDIA PAIR: one address, every machine in the house
15:46 Layer 3: The model. It's just a file
19:53 What's a parameter? Knobs on a mixing board
21:46 Mixture of Experts: pull the L encyclopedia
28:58 Layer 4: Context. The open-book test
33:06 Layer 5: The app. Agents, 11-hour coding sessions, and the harness
38:15 MCP: USB-C for AI
42:17 Wrap: the whole stack in five lines

About the localhost
the localhost is a weekly podcast about local AI: running models on your own hardware, in your own house, with your own data. No cloud required. We're five friends from the Windows and devices world who spend our free time (and a lot of our electricity) figuring out what actually works, and then explaining it in plain English. 127.0.0.1. There's no place like home.

The hosts
Frank Buchholz: Former CTO of Surface Marketing at Microsoft, now running Cadence 3, a consultancy focused on local and on-device AI. Recording this week from his Sprinter van.
Chauncey Larsen: Microsoft. Diehard tech fan, Lego nerd, and the guy whose electricity bill proves it.
Robert Henry: Microsoft, Windows Incubation. Owner of a closet full of Surface devices that are now an AI cluster. Will be wearing a different hockey jersey every week until further notice.
Jacob Rhoades: Microsoft. Thinks about devices as endpoints for a living and runs more local models than anyone should.
Neil Misak: Out this week, somewhere over the Atlantic on his way back from London. Back next episode.

Chauncey, Robert, Jacob, and Neil work at Microsoft. Opinions here are their own and not their employer's.

Shout out to Lars Berlau at HP Poly for the comment that made this episode happen. Lars, let us know if it landed.

If you've been nodding along without following, you're exactly who we want to hear from. Drop a comment and tell us what to explain next.

Listen everywhere: https://thelocalhost.show

#LocalAI #AI #NPU #NVIDIA #DGXSpark #Surface #CopilotPlusPC #Ollama #LMStudio #MixtureOfExperts #MCP #Podcast

No debate this week. No vote. We just opened up our laptops and showed each other what we're actually running, what broke, and what turned out to be worth the trouble.

Jacob figured out the whole local-plus-cloud workflow on a train from Munich to Paris with a spotty hotspot. Robert and Jacob are both splitting AI work across multiple machines with NVIDIA's new Personal AI Router, which means that graphics card in your desk drawer just became useful again. And Frank built an app that tells Uber drivers where to be, running entirely on a server in his office, controlled from his phone.

Plus: Mozilla says the gap between the best cloud models and the ones you can download has narrowed to about four months. Neil takes over the Surface AI Factory. Robert finds out about it live on the show.

And if you've ever thought "I could never run AI myself," the whole middle of this episode is the answer. There's no syntax anymore. It's just a conversation.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open: what actually works
1:00 Around the horn, and Neil's news
2:18 Robert's next chapter
3:16 The Rundown: the four month gap
11:35 How do you actually start?
12:10 Chauncey: okay but what do I DO with it?
13:00 Jacob's train from Munich to Paris
14:50 Get over the fear factor
23:00 NVIDIA PAIR: your old GPU just got useful
25:49 A brief and important pop culture quiz
26:40 Perplexity Computer, and the bicycle company
36:27 The Uber driver app running on The Beast
39:00 Wrap: there's no place like 127.0.0.1

the localhost is five tech industry veterans arguing about AI that runs on your own hardware. Open weight models, NPUs, home labs, and the question underneath it all: who controls intelligence, you or a data center? New episodes weekly.

https://thelocalhost.show

Open weight models were supposed to be that hatch for AI. Download them, run them yourself, walk away whenever you want.

Then NVIDIA bought Hugging Face, the place everyone downloads them from.

Frank worked at Silicon Graphics in the '90s and says he's seen this movie before. Five of us argue about it for forty minutes: is the hatch still open, or did the company you'd escape from just buy the exit?

Plus what happened when we ran a 180 billion parameter model at home, and why one of us cancelled a $200 a month subscription.

(0:00) Cold open: I've seen this movie before
(2:18) The Rundown: NVIDIA closes the Hugging Face deal
(12:31) More from the week's news
(22:43) The Tension: is the escape hatch still open?
(27:46) Neil's counter: the ovens, the recipes, and the CUDA moat
(29:15) Robert flips it: a door instead of a hatch?
(30:10) The vote
(33:52) On My Device
(39:38) Wrap

the localhost is five tech industry veterans arguing about AI that runs on your own hardware. Open weight models, NPUs, home labs, and the question underneath it all: who controls intelligence, you or a data center? New episodes weekly.

thelocalhost.show

Frank takes the hot seat with a paradox. If intelligence keeps getting cheaper, we don't use less of it — we invent more things to do with it. More agents, more inference, more workloads. Which leaves every enterprise with one question they haven't had to ask before: which intelligence should we rent, and which should we own?

Citi and Vercel are reportedly running open-weight models more than half the time. In June it was 29%. By late August, 53%. A new family of models out of the UAE ships six versions built for six classes of hardware — phone to server — with no quantization involved. NVIDIA's Hugging Face acquisition is official. And OpenAI shipped Astra.

We also had four people instead of five, a guest from London, and for the first time in three episodes, a completely unanimous vote.

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CHAPTERS

00:00 If intelligence gets cheap, what do you buy?
00:47 Welcome back — who's here, who's at Disneyland
01:28 Laura Osborn joins from London
02:14 Neil, and the Bears/Seahawks problem
03:07 Chauncey, and the disclosure
03:43 The Rundown: NVIDIA and Hugging Face is official
04:25 Neil: what GitHub can tell us about this
05:48 Citi and Vercel pass 50% open weights
07:50 The three-tier model: endpoint, edge, cloud
08:56 Six models for six classes of hardware
10:22 Purpose-built beats shrinking things down?
11:21 What UK and European customers actually ask for
14:41 From cloud architect to local AI
15:18 OpenAI ships Astra
16:26 Chauncey: be careful what you point it at
17:51 Neil: code generation at the edge
19:33 Baseline: what should people actually care about?
20:20 Open weights are no longer philosophical
21:27 What's coming out of IFA
22:52 The medical school of the future
25:00 Why doesn't anyone know this is possible yet?
26:53 "We have more agents than human employees"
28:23 Tension of the Week: the hardware boom begins
30:27 Chauncey: fixed cost beats a variable one
32:39 Laura: I spent five years telling everyone to go cloud
34:18 Neil: when pennies turn into a million dollars
35:00 The brewery test
36:06 The data center next door
36:34 The vote
38:42 On My Device: the 36B gets the job
40:07 Chauncey: Copilot CLI, running locally
41:44 The Dream Team and the one-person virtual business
41:56 Laura: an on-device speaker coach
42:58 Neil: Mac vs the Beast, round two

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WHAT CAME UP

• NVIDIA acquiring Hugging Face is confirmed. NVIDIA says it stays open and that NVIDIA hardware won't be required. Neil's read: this looks like Microsoft buying GitHub — the same fears, and possibly the same outcome. His angle is that Hugging Face has been effectively off-limits to a lot of enterprises, and being inside a vendor with a security and compliance apparatus may be what finally gets those models sanctioned.

• Citi and Vercel are reported to be running open-weight models for more than half their AI workloads — 29% in June, 53% by late August. Ten weeks.

• The MBZUAI Institute of Foundational Models released six models spanning roughly 1B to 375B parameters, each trained for a specific class of hardware rather than quantized down from something larger. Frank ran the 36B on his dual-3090 workstation against Qwen3.8-27B: about 68 tokens/sec against 40, on a comparable qualifying profile.

• Neil's three tiers: the endpoint, the cloud, and an emerging middle — departmental edge servers. Local doesn't grant you HIPAA or FERPA compliance by itself, but no round trip to the cloud is a smaller attack surface.

• The economics nobody models: an insurance agent filing 50 claims a day, times 10,000 agents. Even at pennies per call, that's over a million dollars a year in workloads that could run at the edge.

• Laura, five years a cloud architect, on doing a full 180: the constraint in Europe isn't just sovereignty rules, it's that cloud capacity is at its limits.

• And Neil's field test of public sentiment, conducted on a bartender who asked him point blank whether he was anti-AI.

The vote was 4–0. First unanimous verdict of the series.

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THIS WEEK'S CREW

Frank Buchholz — host, independent
Laura Osborn — guest, joining from London
Neil Misak
Chauncey Larsen

Jacob Rhoades and Robert Henry are off this week. Jacob is celebrating his first anniversary. Robert was on a plane, sending Teams messages anyway.

DISCLOSURE: Laura, Neil and Chauncey are employed by Microsoft. Frank is independent. All views expressed are their own, nothing discussed is unannounced or non-public, and none of this is financial advice.

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localhost is a weekly show about running AI on hardware you own. Independent and unsponsored.

New episodes weekly: https://thelocalhost.show

There's no place like 127.0.0.1.

#LocalAI #OpenWeights #AI #EdgeAI #AIHardware #Sovereignty #OnDeviceAI #AIPodcast

The crew gets into NVIDIA's reported interest in Hugging Face, a 170B+ parameter model coaxed onto a single consumer card, what Apple's latest silicon means for local AI, and the question underneath all of it: when intelligence becomes a commodity, where does the money go?

Plus: an aerospace CEO in the back of an Uber who can't send his engineering IP to the cloud, and what happened when Robert turned on autopilot and walked away from his desk.

the localhost is Frank Buchholz (independent), Jacob Rhoades, Robert Henry, Neil Misak, and Chauncey Larsen (Microsoft, opinions their own). Independent and unsponsored.

New episodes weekly: https://thelocalhost.show

There's no place like 127.0.0.1.

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.

Creators & Guests

• Chauncey Larsen - Host
• Frank Buchholz - Host
• Jacob Rhoades - Host
• Neil Misak - Host
• Robert Henry - Host

• (00:00) - cold open: from cost to control
• (01:05) - meet the hosts (and who writes the paychecks)
• (04:50) - the rundown: qwen 3.8 lands
• (07:55) - open weight vs open source, explained
• (14:45) - flock cameras: edge capture, central control
• (17:40) - this week's tension: open is a position
• (21:05) - the debate: manifestos, chess games, and IPOs
• (29:15) - the vote
• (31:40) - on my device: five models walk into a job interview
• (34:45) - what's running on the crew's devices
• (37:45) - the 86 percent stat
• (40:20) - wrap: there's no place like 127.0.0.1

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