Local AI vs. OpenAI for Dutch Businesses

GDPR compliance is the elephant in the room. Can you send customer PII to OpenAI? Often, the answer is "No".

Llama 3 on Consumer Hardware

We benchmarked Llama 3 8B on a standard MacBook Pro M3 vs a hosted Azure endpoint. The results were surprising.

For RAG tasks (Retrieval Augmented Generation), local models often outperform larger models because the context is more important than the reasoning power for simple lookup tasks.

The Privacy Advantage

Running AI locally means:

• No data leaves your infrastructure
• GDPR compliance by default
• No per-token costs
• Predictable latency

When to Use What

Use OpenAI/Claude when:

• You need cutting-edge reasoning
• Data privacy isn't a concern
• You're prototyping quickly

Use Local AI when:

• Handling customer PII
• Operating in regulated industries
• Need predictable costs
• Want full control

The Dutch Context

For businesses in the Netherlands, GDPR isn't optional. Local AI isn't just a nice-to-have—it's often a requirement.

The good news? Models like Llama 3 are getting good enough for most business use cases, especially when combined with RAG.