Published May 12, 2026, 7:30 AM EDT Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf . Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design. Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games. Local LLMs have gone from a curiosity thing I poked at, to something I actually use on the regular now. Not for everything - cloud AI still wins at most tasks - but mainly personal documents I need to work through, anything where handing a cloud model the context feels like the wrong call . This use case alone made the whole thing worth setting up, and from there, I've just started paying more attention to what open models are actually capable of doing. Which is what led me to Gemma 4, Google DeepMind's latest open-weight family.…