Instructions here: https://github.com/ghobs91/Self-GPT
If you’ve ever wanted a ChatGPT-style assistant but fully self-hosted and open source, Self-GPT is a handy script that bundles Open WebUI (chat interface front end) with Ollama (LLM backend).
- Privacy & Control: Unlike ChatGPT, everything runs locally, so your data stays with you—great for those concerned about data privacy.
- Cost: Once set up, self-hosting avoids monthly subscription fees. You’ll need decent hardware (ideally a GPU), but there’s a range of model sizes to fit different setups.
- Flexibility: Open WebUI and Ollama support multiple models and let you switch between them easily, so you’re not locked into one provider.
whats great is that with ollama and webui, you can as easily run it all on one computer locally using the open-webui pip package or in a remote server using the container version of open-webui.
Ive run both and the webui is really well done. It offers a number of advanced options, like the system prompt but also memory features, documents for RAG and even a built in python ide for when you want to execute python functions. You can even enable web browsing for your model.
I’m personally very pleased with open-webui and ollama and they both work wonders together. Hoghly recommend it! And the latest llama3.1 (in 8 and 70B variants) and llama3.2 (in 1 and 3B variants) work very well, even on CPU only, for the latter! Give it a shot, it is so easy to set up :)
Do you know of any nifty resources on how to create RAGs using ollama/webui? (Or even fine-tuning?). I’ve tried to set it up, but the documents provided doesn’t seem to be analysed properly.
I’m trying to get the LLM into reading/summarising a certain type of (wordy) files, and it seems the query prompt is limited to about 6k characters.
Increase context length, probably enable flash attention in ollama too. Llama3.1 support up to 128k context length, for example. That’s in tokens and a token is on average a bit under 4 letters.
Note that higher context length requires more ram and it’s slower, so you ideally want to find a sweet spot for your use and hardware. Flash attention makes this more efficient
Oh, and the model needs to have been trained at larger contexts, otherwise it tends to handle it poorly. So you should check what max length the model you want to use was trained to handle
I need to look into flash attention! And if i understand you correctly a larger model of llama3.1 would be better prepared to handle a larger context window than a smaller llama3.1 model?
No, all sizes of llama 3.1 should be able to handle the same size context. The difference would be in the “smarts” of the model. Bigger models are better at reading between the lines and higher level understanding and reasoning.
There are not that many use cases where fine tuning a local model will yield significantly better task performance.
My advice would be to choose a model with a large context window and just throw in the prompt the whole text you want summarized (which is basically what a rag would do anyway).
The problem I keep running into with that approach is that only the last page is actually summarised and some of the texts are… Longer.
Yeh, i did some looking up in the meantime and indeed you’re gonna have a context size issue. That’s why it’s only summarizing the last few thousand characters of the text, that’s the size of its attention.
There are some models fine-tuned to 8K tokens context window, some even to 16K like this Mistral brew. If you have a GPU with 8G of VRAM you should be able to run it, using one of the quantized versions (Q4 or Q5 should be fine). Summarizing should still be reasonably good.
If 16k isn’t enough for you then that’s probably not something you can perform locally. However you can still run a larger model privately in the cloud. Hugging face for example allows you to rent GPUs by the minute and run inference on them, it should just net you a few dollars. As far as i know this approach should still be compatible with Open WebUI.
Thanks! I actually picked up the concept of context window, and from there how to create a modelfile, through one of the links provided earlier and it has made a huge difference. In your experience, would a small model like llama3.2 with a bigger context window be able to provide the same output as a big modem L, like qwen2.5:14b, with a more limited window? The bigger window obviously allow more data to be taken into account, but how does the model size compare?
For RAG, there are some tools available in open-webui, which are documented here: https://docs.openwebui.com/tutorials/features/rag They have plans for how to expand and improve it, which they describe here: https://docs.openwebui.com/roadmap#information-retrieval-rag-
For fine-tuning, I think this is (at least for now) out of scope. They focus on inferencing. I think the direction is to eventually help you create/manage your own data which you get from using LLMs using Open-WebUI, but the task of actually fine-tuning is not possible (yet) using either ollama or open-webui.
I have not used the RAG function yet, but besides following the instructions on how to set it up, your experience with RAG may also be somewhat limited depending on which embedding model you use. You may have to go and look for a good model (which is probably both small and efficient to re-scan your documents yet powerful to generate meaningful embeddings). Also, in case you didn’t know, the embeddings you generate are specific to an embedding model, so if you change that model you’ll have to rescan your whole documents library.
Edit: RAG seems a bit limited by the supported file types. You can get it here: https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/blob/2fa94956f4e500bf5c42263124c758d8613ee05e/backend/apps/rag/main.py#L328 It seems not to support word documents, or PDFs, so mostly incompatible with documents which have advanced formatting and are WYSIWYG.
Thank you for your detailed answer:) it’s 20 years and 2 kids since I last tried my hand at reading code, but I’m doing my best to catch up😊 Context window is a concept I picked up from your links which has provided me much help!
Are you running these llms in containers completely cut off from the internet? My understanding was that the “local first” llms aren’t truly offline and only try and answer base queries offline before contacting their provider for support. This invalidating the privacy argument.
The interface called open-webui can run in a container, but ollama runs as a service on your system, from my understanding.
The models are local and only answer queries by default. It all happens on the system without any additional tools. Now, if you want to give them internet access, you can, it is an option you have to setup and open-webui makes that possible though I have not tried it myself. I just see it.
I have never heard of any llm “answer base queries offline before contacting their provider for support”. It’s almost impossible for the LLM to do it by itself without you setting things up for it that way.
I’ve seen this behavior mentioned on phones (Google, Samsung). They have a chip for the basic tasks, but for heavier stuff (e. g. images) they call home.
Where would an open source LLM that you run locally phone home to, exactly? It requires a lot of GPU compute, do you think someone’s just going to give that away for free, without even requiring an account they can turn into saleable data?
But wait, there’s an even better way to be sure: download OpenHardwareMonitor so you can watch your GPU go to 100%, and this or GPT4All or something. Then airgap your computer, and try it yourself.