A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Learning/practice, and any use that feeds in sensitive data you want to keep on-prem.
Unless you’re set to retire within the next 5 years, the best reason is to keep your resume up to date with some hands-on experience. With the way they’re trying to shove AI into every possible application, there will be few (if any) industries untouched. If you don’t start now, you’re going to be playing catch up in a few years.
As cool and neato as I find AI to be, I haven't really found a good use case for it in the selfhosting/homelabbing arena. Most of my equipment is ancient and lacking the GPU necessary to drive that bus.
7b is the smallest I've found useful. I'd try a smaller quant before going lower, if I had super small vram.
It'll work for quick bash scripts and one-off things like that. But there's not usually enough context window unless you're using a 24G GPU or such.
Yeah shell scripts are one of those things that you never remember how to do something and have to always look it up!
Snippets are a great use.
I use StableCode on my phone as a programming tutor for learning Python. It is outstanding in both speed and in accuracy for this task. I have it generate definitions which I copy and paste into Anki the flashcard app. Whenever I'm on a bus or airplane I just start studying. Wish that it could also quiz me interactively.
Please be very careful. The python code it'll spit out will most likely be outdated, not work as well as it should (the code isn't "thought out" as if a human did it.
If you want to learn, dive it, set yourself tasks, get stuck, and f around.
I know what you mean. All the code generated with ai was loaded with problems. Specifically it kept forcing my api keys into the code without using environmental variables. But for basic coding concepts it has so far been perfect. even a 3b model seemingly generates great definitions
I installed Llama. I've not found any use for it. I mean, I've asked it for a recipe because recipe websites suck, but that's about it.
you can do a lot with it.
I heated my office with it this past winter.
Sorry, I am just gonne dump you some links from my bookmarks that were related and interesting to read, cause I am traveling and have to get up in a minute, but I've been interested in this topic for a while. All of the links discuss at least some usecases. For some reason microsoft is really into tiny models and made big breakthroughs there.
https://reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1cdrw7p/what_are_the_potential_uses_of_small_less_than_3b/
https://github.com/microsoft/BitNet
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-2-the-surprising-power-of-small-language-models/
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/the-phi-3-small-language-models-with-big-potential/
Have you tried RAG? I believe that they are actually pretty good for searching and compiling content from RAG.
So in theory you could have it connect to all of you local documents and use it for quick questions. Or maybe connected to your signal/whatsapp/sms chat history to ask questions about past conversations
No, what is it? How do I try it?
RAG is basically like telling an LLM "look here for more info before you answer" so it can check out local documents to give an answer that is more relevant to you.
You just search "open web ui rag" and find plenty kf explanations and tutorials
I think RAG will be surpassed by LLMs in a loop with tool calling (aka agents), with search being one of the tools.
LLMs that train LoRas on the fly then query themselves with the LoRa applied
Converting free text to standardized forms such as json
Oh—do you happen to have any recommendations for that?
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B
I've run a few models that I could on my GPU. I don't think the smaller models are really good enough. They can do stuff, sure, but to get anything out of it, I think you need the larger models.
They can be used for basic things, though. There are coder specific models you can look at. Deepseek and qwen coder are some popular ones
I haven't actually found the coder-specific ones to be much (if at all) better than the generic ones. I wish I could have. Hopefully LLMs can become more efficient in the very near future.
Been coming to similar conclusions with some local adventures. It's decent but not as able to process larger contexts.
I've used smollm2:135m for projects in DBeaver building larger queries. The box it runs on is Intel HD 530 graphics with an old i5-6500T processor. Doesn't seem to really stress the CPU.
UPDATE: I apologize to the downvoter for not masochistically wanting to build a 1000 line bulk insert statement by hand.
How, exactly, do you have Intel HD graphics, found on Intel APUs, on a Ryzen AMD system?
Sorry, I was trying to find parts for my daughter's machine while doing this (cheap Minecraft build). I corrected my comment.
I've integrated mine into Home Assistant, which makes it easier to use their voice commands.
I haven't done a ton with it yet besides set it up, though, since I'm still getting proxmox configured on my gaming rig.