Hi there.

I wanted to run LLMs locally on my server (for better privacy), and was wondering if:

  1. I could use Intel ARC/AMD GPUs - these are often less expensive and AMD has open source drivers, which is something I like.
  2. If a PCIe x4 Gen 3 slot would be enough (it’s an x16 slot with x4 speeds) - this is an important consideration.
  3. Would 8GB of RAM (in the GPU, I believe it’s called VRAM?) be enough?

I’m looking at language models to train on my Reddit and Lemmy content, in an aim to make it write like me (and maybe even better than me? Who knows). I don’t quite know which models I will train, or how I will do so (I certainly won’t be writing anything from scratch), but I was wondering; with the explosion of FOSS AI models, maybe something like this would be possible with the hardware constraints I mentioned above?

Does the speed of the connection between the GPU and the CPU really matter in such applications?

Thanks!

  • @[email protected]English
    3•1 year ago

    Probably not, you might be able to run a 350m parameter model but you really need to hit 7b-70b parameters before you start to see anything particularly effective.

    8gb VRAM, how much Ram? Maybe you can do some training with your cpu but training neural networks benefits greatly from the GPU. It’s not typical to do training on the CPU because of this