You can check Hugging Face’s website for specific requirements. I will warn you that lot of home machines don’t fit the minimum requirements for a lot of models available there. There is TinyLlama and it can run on most underpowered machines, but its functionalities are very limited and it would lack a lot as an everyday AI Chatbot. You can check my other comment too for other options.
The issue with that method, as you’ve noted, is that it prevents people with less powerful computers from running local LLMs. There are a few models that would be able to run on an underpowered machine, such as TinyLlama; but most users want a model that can do a plethora of tasks efficiently like ChatGPT can, I daresay. For people who have such hardware limitations, I believe the only option is relying on models that can be accessed online.
For that, I would recommend Mistral’s Mixtral models (https://chat.mistral.ai/) and the surfeit of models available on Poe AI’s platform (https://poe.com/). Particularly, I use Poe for interacting with the surprising diversity of Llama models they have available on the website.
I think that in that case, YouTube is your friend. There are a few pretty straight forward videos that can help you out; if you’re serious about it you’re going have to, eventually, become familiar with it.
My favorite anime website is down; good thing FMHY has a bunch of great ones to choose from. Migrating sucks, though.