Is this really a thing? Do you have any recommendations?

GPT4ALL sounds like your best bet. It’s one of the easiest to set up solutions at the moment. As best as I can tell none of the open and local options are gpt4 level yet. that’s it, there are lots of models to play with and they seem to be getting better very quickly. GPT4ALL makes it pretty simple I specifically linking the models that work and helping you download them.

the one downside is that I don’t believe they have implemented GPU models yet. that means things are easy to set up, but it’s going to be a slow experience, especially if you don’t have a really beefy CPU and lots of RAM.