I saw the Gemma 4 challenge on dev.to. I wanted to participate. I had absolutely no idea where to start.

I opened the challenge page and the first thing I saw was "run a Gemma 4 model locally." I stared at that sentence for a while.

What does running locally even mean?

I genuinely thought AI only lived on big servers somewhere. You type, it thinks, it replies. I never questioned how it worked. It just worked.

So I started asking basic questions. Really basic ones.