LM Studio

About

LM Studio turns running a language model on a Mac into a few clicks: search a catalog of GGUF and MLX models, see which ones suit the machine's memory, download one and start chatting without a terminal or a cloud key. Everything runs locally, so prompts never leave the computer, and the bundled runtime picks a backend for the hardware. The Developer tab can serve the loaded model on an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, with port, context length and model chosen by hand, which is how editors, scripts and agents get pointed at it. Chat histories and presets are kept per model, and the app is free for personal and commercial use even though the desktop app itself is closed source. It needs macOS 12 or later.