Emacs and private AI: a great match
Aaron Grothe (he/him) - Pronunciation: Air-un Grow-the, https://www.grothe.us LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-grothe/, ajgrothe@yahoo.com
The following image shows where the talk is in the schedule for Sat 2025-12-06. Solid lines show talks with Q&A via BigBlueButton. Dashed lines show talks with Q&A via IRC or Etherpad.
Format: 20-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room https://media.emacsconf.org/2025/current/bbb-private-ai.html
Discuss on IRC: #emacsconf
Status: Waiting for video from speaker
Saturday, Dec 6 2025, ~12:10 PM - 12:30 PM MST (US/Mountain)
Saturday, Dec 6 2025, ~11:10 AM - 11:30 AM PST (US/Pacific)
Saturday, Dec 6 2025, ~7:10 PM - 7:30 PM UTC
Saturday, Dec 6 2025, ~8:10 PM - 8:30 PM CET (Europe/Paris)
Saturday, Dec 6 2025, ~9:10 PM - 9:30 PM EET (Europe/Athens)
Sunday, Dec 7 2025, ~12:40 AM - 1:00 AM IST (Asia/Kolkata)
Sunday, Dec 7 2025, ~3:10 AM - 3:30 AM +08 (Asia/Singapore)
Sunday, Dec 7 2025, ~4:10 AM - 4:30 AM JST (Asia/Tokyo)
Description
When experimenting with using AI with Emacs, many users have concerns. A few of the concerns that people have are the possibility of their information being shared with the AI provider (either to train newer models, or as a potential revenue source), the possibility of running up unpredictable costs with their cloud provider, and the potential environmental impact of using cloud AI. Using Private/Local AI models provide an AI environment that the user can fully control. User can add to it incrementally over time as their skills and experience grows. This talk will be a quick intro to using Ollama Buddy, Ellama, and gptel to add the ability to have a private AI integrated into your Emacs session. We’ll start with the basics and show people how they can add AI to their workflow safely and securely. Hopefully, people will come away from the talk feeling better about our AI futures.
The talk will start with a simple implementation: Ollama and Ollama Buddy and a couple of models. After that it will build on that for the rest of the 20 minutes.
The goal is show the users multiple ways of using AI with Emacs and let them make their own choices.
About the speaker:
AI is everywhere and everyone is trying to figure out how to use it better. This talk will be a quick introduction to showing some of the tools and techniques that a user can do to integrate AI privately and securely into their Emacs workflow. The goal is to help people take the first steps on what will hopefully be a productive journey.
Questions or comments? Please e-mail ajgrothe@yahoo.com