Models, tiers, and what runs on this device
Gezel doesn't come with its own AI — it puts your choice of AI to work. That can be a cloud provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub Copilot) or a model running locally on your own machine. With a local model, your data never leaves the room.
Tiers: matching the model to the job
Models come in sizes, and size matters for what a gezel can be trusted to do alone. Gezel groups them into tiers:
| Tier | Size (in billions of parameters) | Good at |
|---|---|---|
| tiny | under 5B | quick drafts, simple lookups |
| small | 5–12B | everyday chat, focused single tasks |
| medium | 12–45B | multi-step work with tools |
| large | 45B and up, local | most roles, unsupervised steps |
| cloud | hosted frontier models | everything |
Every role declares a model floor — the minimum tier it needs to work unsupervised. A reviewer gating your deliverables needs more headroom than a gezel drafting a shopping list, and gezel enforces that automatically.
A tier says what a size class should manage. For what individual models actually did — measured, on a real machine — see the Model scorecard. It is the fastest way to pick a local model you can trust with a given job, and How we test models explains what the numbers do and do not tell you.
On this device
Gezel classifies each device as tiny, small, medium, or large from the memory available to local models.
Installed local models
Gezel runs local models (llama.cpp, MLX, Ollama and friends) alongside cloud providers — the Models catalog in the app shows what fits your machine.
Choosing
You don't have to get this right up front. Set a default provider in Settings, and override it per gezel only when a companion needs something different — a big cloud model for your reviewer, a fast local one for day-to-day chat. Gezel checks each new model's fitness on your hardware before recommending it.
The public Gezel Gilde model catalog lists the local chat, image, and video models Gezel knows about, including their download size, context, license, supported engines, and hardware tier. Once you have a shortlist that fits, the Model scorecard shows how those models actually performed.