Harnessing Local AI Models for Research at Dartmouth
An approachable guide for scholars who want powerful, secure, and free AI assistance.
Why Local Models Matter for Researchers Your ideas stay on campus – Prompts, drafts, and analyses never leave Dartmouth’s servers, protecting unpublished research and sensitive material. Unlimited, cost-free access – Through chat.dartmouth.edu and the Dartmouth Chat API you get unlimited daily usage of local models at no charge. Open-weight technology – The models (e.g., GPT-OSS 120B, Gemma 3 27B, LLaMA 3.2 11B, Qwen3-VL 32B) are open-weight; meaning their neural network parameters are released, checkpoints are available, and detailed papers describing architecture and training objectives have been published. These benefits make local models a strong default for many common research tasks—writing, coding, summarization, and exploratory analysis—without the hidden risks of sending data to external vendors.
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