Mistral AI's Mixtral 8x7b, a "mixture of experts" model, is generating buzz for matching or exceeding GPT-3.5 and Llama2 70b on several benchmarks. This guide explains how to run Mixtral locally using Ollama, a tool that simplifies the installation process on MacOS and Linux, with future support for Windows. The model requires 48GB of RAM, but users can opt for the smaller Mistral 7b if needed. The tutorial walks through setting up Mixtral with LlamaIndex, an open-source tool for data querying, by installing necessary dependencies and conducting a "smoke test" to ensure proper installation. Users learn to load and index data using the Qdrant vector database and create a query engine to interact with the model. The guide culminates in building a basic Flask web service to query the model via an API, emphasizing the ease and accessibility of running sophisticated AI models locally with open-source tools.