Claudebot is blowing up everywhere and for good reason. Almost everyone agrees it's the most powerful AI tool ever created. A literal 247 AI employee.
The issue is there's almost no agreement on the correct way to set it up. Half of people are running out and buying $600 Mac minis. The other half are crying and say, "Hey, you're wasting your money.
Set this up for free on a VPS. " In this video, I'm going to go through every single way you can be setting up Clawbot and show you why I think the Mac Mini is actually the right way to be doing this. I'm also going to tell you why I'm returning my Mac Mini.
Yeah, let's get into this. So, I'm going to be going through every single way you could be setting up Claudebot. By the end of this video, you know exactly the right way for you to be doing it.
Even if you already have Claudebot set up, you'll be able to know if you set it up the right way and if you should switch to another device or another service. I'm going to go through every way you could be doing it. Whether it's the Mac Mini or an old dusty laptop in your closet or a VPS or one of these one-click launch services that are popping up.
I feel like there's a hundred of them. Now, I'm going to go through the strengths and weaknesses for each and you will be all good to go to get the most out of Claudebot by the end of this video. So, stick around with me here.
Let's start with the Mac Mini and the VPS. I feel like these are the two most popular ways people are setting up their Clawbots. That's how I set up mine was with the Mac Mini.
But, I feel like most people are saying, "Hey, you're wasting your money. Go with the VPS. " Well, here are the strengths and weaknesses of those two.
So, right off the rip, Mac Mini, it's starting at $600. I don't think you need an expensive Mac Mini. The ones that are more than $600.
I think you can get away with a base one, but $600 is still a lot for a lot of people. On the VPS side, this is the virtual private server side. This is like the Amazon EC2s and other virtual private servers.
They are cheap. You can get away with using this for free on Amazon EC2. I even had a video about setting it up on the Amazon EC2.
I'll link to that down below. But you can get away with using that for free. From a cost perspective, the VPS might be the strongest out of all of them.
But here's where the strengths of the Mac Mini come in and the weaknesses of the VPS. The Mac Mini is secure by default. By default, when you set up Claudebot on a Mac Mini, it has access to nothing.
It can't leak anything because it's not connected to anything. It's not public facing. So, by default, the Mac Mini is extremely secure.
By default, the VPS is not secure. In fact, it is the least secure of all these ones that we have up here. Now, by default, there is no security set up with a VPS.
When you put this on Amazon EC2, that server instance is public to the entire internet. Meaning, if you set up your Clogbot in there, people can access your keys. That is not good.
That means people can steal your keys and use all your services and charge you thousands of dollars. In order to secure a VPS, you need to do a whole bunch of technical things. You need to install SSH and firewalls and a whole bunch of other things.
For the average person, that is too complex. and I wouldn't recommend doing it. On top of that, the VPS is extremely hard to interact with.
It's just a CLI in your browser. For most people, they don't want to sit there and their way of engaging with an AI agent just talking to a CLI. On top of that, it doesn't integrate, right?
So, if you want to send it a photo or an image or a video, it's going to be extremely difficult to do. As for the Mac Mini, it's extremely easy to interact with. I would argue that Mac OS is the most userfriendly operating system of them all.
It takes seconds to get into and there's a reason why it's the most popular OS. It's also fully integrated. So if you have other Apple devices like I have an iPhone for instance, I have an iPad, I have a MacBook Pro.
Anytime I want to give my 247 AI employee agent a file, whether it's a photo or a video or anything, all I have to do is click a button and I can airdrop that file to my Mac Mini that has my Clawbot on it. So for instance, if I want to make the thumbnail for this video, all I need to do is airdrop the video to my Claudebot. say, "Hey, check out the video.
Look at the transcript and create me a thumbnail. " It and it can go and do that. So, it is fully integrated into my entire workflow, which is really amazing and like honestly like 90% of the value.
Anyway, on top of that, you can use all the modern AI tools with it. So, one of the strengths of the Claudebot is it is a basically a human employee. It can do anything a human being can do.
All these AI companies, the tools they come out with, they drop on Apple first. They come out on Apple products first. So your Clawbot can leverage all those powerful AI tools that drop like the new codecs that just dropped for instance.
It's only on Apple. So by getting a Mac Mini, you're going to have all the modern tools. I believe by going with a VPS like Amazon EC2, you are absolutely destroying your experience with Cloudbot just so that you can save a couple dollars.
You're putting a really insecure instance of Claudebot on the internet that people can hack. you're having a really unpleasant experience using Claudebot, which I feel like 90% of this is like just having fun and using the Claudebot and engaging with it and talking with it and it doesn't integrate with any of your tools. So, it's really limiting its strength.
This is why I went with the Mac Mini. But, as I'm going to go over a little bit later in this video, I'm actually returning my Mac Mini and you'll see why. And it might be the best option for you as well to not go with the Mac Mini.
But, for 90% of people, I think the Mac Mini is the correct way to go. As for the VPS, I'd put at zero% of people. I think VPS is the wrong choice for basically everyone on planet Earth.
And I think the people going with the VPS and preaching for the VPS are like trying to take some sort of contrarian stance cuz they don't like it when big Apple sells Mac minis. I just don't understand why anyone would go with the VPS. So then you have the one-click launch services.
There are a ton of these out there. I'm not going to name them all, but these are like brand new companies that have basically spun up over the last week that are basically, hey, we'll make it super easy to install Cloudbot on the cloud. All you got to do is click one button.
And they do have some strengths. They're cheap. They're also like $15 a month.
They are super easy. You literally click one button and you have it set up on their cloud and their servers. It is also more secure.
They kind of set up their own guard rail, so it is very secure on their servers. But for me, the issues are dealreaking. Again, you have to log into a browser, then log onto a server to interact with this AI agent.
A lot of the power of Claudebot comes from the fact that it's living on your computer. You can watch it work. You can watch it click on your different files, open up browsers, interact with the internet.
When you have it on these one-click services, they're on some sort of server you can't see. So, that eliminates, again, like 90% of the value. It's not powerful because it's not integrated with all your tools and all your computer.
It's not integrated with all your files, all your videos, all your photos, all your memories. It's not integrated with any of that. So, all the power is taken away from it as well.
And listen, this is a competition. If your Claudebot's going up against someone else's Clawbot and they have access to all the tools, all the powerful AI tools out there and yours doesn't, you're not going to win. You want to have a powerful Clawbot.
And on top of that, it's unreliable. I have tried setting up the one-click Clawbot on like five different services. Four of them just straight up didn't work.
and it crashed and it wouldn't give me any reason why. It didn't load up. It didn't remember a lot of things I needed to remember.
It just wasn't a very usable service. So, I'd say the one-click launch services are just about as useless as the VPS. So, now we have the dusty computer in your closet and the Mac Studio.
Dusty computer in your closet is basically any computer out there that's cheap, whether you have it in your closet or you run out and buy some Linux computer or cheap HP or Chromebook or something like that. And Mac Studio is basically any expensive AI computer. the Mac Studio, the DGX Spark, the Tiny Box, anything that's super powerful and has tons of GPU and memory inside of it.
You can I'm basically using that as substitute names. This dusty computer in your closet is an excellent option. I'm not going to tell anyone they shouldn't be using that old HP laptop in their closet.
It's the cheapest. You already have it. It's free, so you might as well take it out.
It's local, so you're running your Claudebot locally, not on some server in the cloud. So again, it's more secure by default, and it's totally customizable. It's your own computer, so you can give it any tools you want or have it do anything you want.
The downsides are it's a tad less secure. So, for instance, if you're using an old computer that's logged into your email, your messaging services, your Twitter account, your YouTube, when you boot up your Clawbot, it's going to by default have access to all of those accounts, right? So, if you're Claudebot, you accidentally give it a prompt you didn't want to give it to and then it goes on your Twitter and tweets something insane, it's going to be a little less secure because you don't have full control off what it had access to right away.
So, the best option if you're going to use a dusty computer in your closet is to do a complete wipe right off the rip. It also might not be able to run the latest tech. So, if you're running like an old Windows computer or something like that, you're not going to be able to download the latest tools from the different AI companies and give it access to your Cloudbot.
If you're running a brand new Mac Mini, you're going to get all the latest AI tools from all the companies out there because they make it built for the new Mac operating systems. But I would say this for most people, if you do not feel like running out and buying a $600 Mac Mini, the Dusty Computer in Your Closet is an excellent choice. And by the way, at the end of this, I'm going to rank them all so you know which one you should be going with.
But the dusty computer in your closet, I have no complaints. It's an excellent choice. If you do not want to run out and commit $600 to this project, pull out that dusty Chromebook in your closet, install Claudebot, dip your toes in, and then if it's something you like and you get use out of, which I pretty much guarantee you will, then you can run out and get the real device you want to run it on.
Which brings us to the Mac Studio. I am actually, even though I think the Mac Mini is the best choice for 99. 9% of people out there, I'm actually returning my Mac Mini for not one Mac Studio, but two Mac Studios for $10,000 each.
That's right. I just spent $20,000 on Claudebot. But let me tell you why.
So, it has all the advantages of the Mac Mini. So, everything we went through with the Mac Mini, it has those advantages. It's exactly the same operating system.
But here's the difference though, and here's why I think this changes everything and why I'm not only willing to spend $20,000, but I'm going to probably end up buying a third and fourth Mac Studio, is number one, free AI. You can with the Mac Studio with 512 GB of memory run pretty much any local model. The most powerful local model at the moment is Kimmy K2.
5, which is near Opus level intelligence, which Opus is the best AI model out there. It's the most powerful one. It's the best for Claudebot.
You can get basically that level of power locally on your computer with Kimmy K 2. 5. Now, to run Kimmy K 2.
5, you will need two Mac Studios with 512 GB of memory each. It is a 600 gigabyte model, which means you need at least 600 GB of local memory to run it because it loads into the local memory. So, if you want the most powerful local model, you will need two Mac Studios maxed out.
But you can run pretty much any other model with a single Mac Studio with the 512 GB of RAM. What does that mean? Why would you want to run a local AI model?
Well, the advantages to that are one, it's free. You're just paying the cost of your power. You're not paying for tokens like you do with the API.
Now, if you use the Opus API for everything right now, you're probably spending at least $1,000 a month on this. With local models, it's completely free. Two, the model is totally customizable.
So if I want to tinker and change the model and try different things out with the model, I can do that. Three, privacy. All your queries will remain local.
So I can literally unplug my Mac Studio from the internet in my apartment and it will still be able to run. It's not sending any of your data, any of your private data to the cloud. So if I want to have private conversations with my AI, I'm able to do that without the AI executives being able to read all my transcripts.
And then what in my opinion is the most important strength of them all because of all those things I mentioned. You can run this 24/7 365. The whole point of Claudebot is is that it is your 24/7 AI employee.
That's its strength. There's never been an AI tool that can do that. The issue is is if you hamstring Claudebot by either running it in the cloud, running it on a VPS or using a really expensive model like Opus that you can't quite use a ton because it's too expensive, it's not actually a 247 employee.
But if you have a local model that doesn't cost you anything and is super intelligent, I can have it processing and doing things for me literally 247 365. So, I can achieve the actual vision of Claudebot that they had when they released this product. And that is why for me it is worth it for $20,000.
I don't compare the $20,000 to like the price of Netflix or the price of an Xbox because if you do that, yeah, it seems really expensive. What I compare the price to is the price of hiring someone, right? The if you want to hire an employee right now, that's $100,000 a year.
Even if you want to hire someone offshore who's on one of those really discount, cheaper Fiverr sites, that's still going to cost you thousands of dollars a year. So, if you compare it to that, this is actually a really good deal. The downsides to the Mac Studio are, yeah, it's expensive, $20,000.
It's significantly more than the $600 Mac Mini or the free VPS. There's more setup to run models locally. That's not like a one click and it's good to go and it's running thing.
There is a little bit of technical work needed for that. with AI. It makes it a lot easier, but it's harder to set up than all the other ones and it has the biggest footprint.
I'm about to have two massive Mac studios sitting on my desk, uh, which is going to take up a lot of room. I actually literally, you can't see it, but I bought a much bigger desk yesterday. It took from IKEA that took me like 3 hours to build just so I can fit all these Mac Studios on the desk.
I think the Mac Studio is worth it for you. If you are ready to go all the way in with Claudba, I don't think it's the solution for everyone. I would first either go with a dusty computer in your closet or a Mac Mini.
See if it's right for you. See if you like the technology. See if you're getting value out of it.
Then if you are and you really want to kick it up a notch and you have use cases that would be improved by having a local model running 24/7, 365, then you can go all the way in on a Mac Studio. I'm not sitting here recommending everyone go out and spend $20,000 like me. I'm a special case because I run a business by myself.
I do content. This is going to make great videos for you guys when I show you how the Mac Studio runs. So, for me, it was, in my opinion, more than worth it.
And I probably will end up buying the M5 Ultra when that comes out as well in the next few months and just have three Mac Studios all over my desk. So, if I were to rank this right now, honestly, in my opinion, I go Mac Mini1 dusty computer in your closet a very close second. Mac Studio 3 only if you're a power user and then VPS and oneclick launch services.
I just don't think for most people you're going to get the value out of Claudebot. Requires tons of work and you're not going to get the most value out of Claudebot you can. I just think this is a way for the contrarian anti-corporate people on Twitter to say, "Hey, don't buy your Mac Mini.
You're pumping the Apple stock. " Shut up. Let me know down below which you've gone with and which you are going to go with.
Leave a like down below if you learned anything at all in this video. Subscribe and turn on notifications. All I do is create amazing content on Claudebot, AI, and making your life way more productive with all these tools.
Also, let me know down below if there's any other videos having to do with Claudebot you'd like me to make as well. I film every single day. I have a lot of cool stuff coming out.
I'm really sure you will enjoy. Hope this was helpful. I'll see you in the next video.
