You still need ridiculously high spec hardware, and at Apple’s prices, that isn’t cheap.
You can easily run models like Mistral and Stable Diffusion in Ollama and Draw Things, and you can run newer models like Devstral (the MLX version) and Z Image Turbo with a little effort using LM Studio and Comfyui. It isn't as fast as using a good nVidia GPU or a cloud GPU but it's certainly good enough to play around with and learn more about it. I've written a bunch of apps that give me a browser UI talking to an API that's provided by an app running a model locally and it works perfectly well. I did that on an 8GB M1 for 18 months and then upgraded to a 24GB M4 Pro recently. I still have the M1 on my network for doing AI things in the background.
You can easily run models like Mistral and Stable Diffusion in Ollama and Draw Things, and you can run newer models like Devstral (the MLX version) and Z Image Turbo with a little effort using LM Studio and Comfyui. It isn't as fast as using a good nVidia GPU or a cloud GPU but it's certainly good enough to play around with and learn more about it. I've written a bunch of apps that give me a browser UI talking to an API that's provided by an app running a model locally and it works perfectly well. I did that on an 8GB M1 for 18 months and then upgraded to a 24GB M4 Pro recently. I still have the M1 on my network for doing AI things in the background.