I pointed the OpenAI SDK at my friend's gaming PC. It just worked.

I changed two strings in a Python script — base_url and api_key — and it stopped calling OpenAI. Instead, the request travelled across the public internet, into a Podman container running on a friend's idle gaming PC, ran inference on a local Llama 3.2, and streamed the response back to my laptop. No cloud account. No API key. No data egress to a third party. The Python looked like this: from openai import OpenAI client = OpenAI ( base_url = " http://127.0.0.1:8080/v1 " , api_key = " anything "