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Purpose: Ready to paste follow up messages for the Comox Valley AI community after Meetup #1.
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Hey folks, thank you again for showing up to CV + AI Meetup #1.
That room had exactly the mix we hoped for: technical depth, local leadership, education questions, data sovereignty concerns, creative energy, civic context, cheese, and a lot of human care.
A few threads worth continuing here:
Around seven people in the room are already running pieces of a local AI stack. If that is you, please share what you are running: hardware, storage, models, interface, retrieval setup, agent tools, safety practices and what keeps breaking.
If you are using ChatGPT and want to try local AI, the simplest first path mentioned was LM Studio or Open WebUI with Ollama. Ask here if you want help figuring out what your computer can run.
Steve's student safe AI idea opened a strong middle path: not banning AI, not giving students unlimited chatbot access, but using constraints, citations, human review and age appropriate design.
Quanah's point was clear: Canadian servers are not the whole story if the provider is an American company. Nonprofits, schools, clinics, municipalities and small businesses should revisit how AI tools affect privacy and compliance.
Ideas already surfaced: local AI stack show and tell, student safe AI, data sovereignty for organizations, the Cumberland Linux zero day story, and practical agentic coding for non technical builders.
If you came away with a question, a tool, a concern, or a resource, drop it here. This chapter gets stronger when the knowledge moves sideways.
Post this as its own thread:
Local AI stack share
If you are running any local AI, even a small piece, reply with: