Yeah, I think folks here are not giving them enough credit. It wasn't just some random dude drawing lines for no reason.
The purpose of a lot of what Britain was doing was to prevent unification into a new Ottoman Empire successor. They intended the internal conflict in the region.
And it worked at keeping the Middle East busy and Europe safe for the most part (if you don't count the incalculable death toll having them fighting amongst themselves has caused, and random terrorist attacks).
You can run smaller models locally, and they can get the job done, but they are not as good as the huge models that would not fit on a your graphics card.
If you are technically adept and can run python, you can try using this:
https://gpt4all.io/index.html
It has a front end, and I can run queries against it in the same API format as sending them to openai.