Yup. He wasn’t very attractive (but not ugly either), but was very good at talking to people. Manipulating them and playing them off on one another, delivering just the right amount of praise or scorn at the right time. Complete narcissistic asshole if you knew him well. Not to mention really racist.

OpenRouter has some decently powerful free-to-use models, but I’m afraid as far as LLMs go ‘free’, ‘good’, and ‘private’ are going to be pretty mutually exclusive if you can’t run one locally.