CPU
The general-purpose processor at the heart of any computer, good at doing many different things one after another, unlike a GPU which does one kind of thing to a lot of data at once.
Your laptop’s CPU runs the operating system, the browser and everything else. It is built for flexibility: a handful of powerful cores that switch between very different tasks quickly.
AI work wants the opposite shape, which is why GPUs took over. Training and running a model means the same multiplication repeated across enormous grids of numbers, and a GPU has thousands of simpler cores designed to do exactly that in parallel. CPUs can still run smaller models on your own machine, just slowly, which is why local AI tools often tell you how much of the work went to the GPU.
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