Wondering about services to test on either a 16gb ram “AI Capable” arm64 board or on a laptop with modern rtx. Only looking for open source options, but curious to hear what people say. Cheers!
I run ollama and auto1111 on my desktop when it’s powers on. Using open-webui in my homelab always on, and also connected to openrouter. This way I can always use openwebui with openrouter models and it’s pretty cheap per query and a little more private that using a big tech chatbot. And if I want local, I turn on the desktop and have local lamma and stab diff.
I also get bugger all benefit out of it., it’s a cute toy.
I run kobold.cpp which is a cutting edge local model engine, on my local gaming rig turned server. I like to play around with the latest models to see how they improve/change over time. The current chain of thought thinking models like deepseek r1 distills and qwen qwq are fun to poke at with advanced open ended STEM questions. Things like “What does Gödel’s incompleteness theorem imply about scientific theories of everything?” Or “Could the speed of light be more accurately refered to as ‘the speed of causality’?”
As for actual use: I prefer using mistral small 24b and treating it like a local search engine with the legitimacy of wikipedia. I ask it questions about general things I don’t know about or want advice on, it usually then do further research through more legitimate sources. Its important to not take the LLM too seriously as theres always a small statistical chance it hallucinates some bullshit but most of the time its fairly accurate and is a pretty good jumping off point for further research.
Like if I want an overview of how can I repair small holes forming in concrete, or general ideas on how to invest financially, maybe it suggest dividends and I dont know what those are so follow up asking what a dividend is or why companies would offer them to holders. Things like that.
If the LLM says a word or related concept I don’t recognize I grill it for clarifying info and follow it through the infinite branching garden of related information.
I’ve used an LLM to help me go through old declassified documents and speculate on internal gov terminalogy I was unfamiliar with.
I’ve used a speech to text model and get it to speek just for fun. Ive used multimodal model and get it to see/scan documents for info.
Ive used websearch to get the model to retrieve information it didn’t know off a ddg search, again mostly for fun.
Feel free to ask me anything, I’m glad to help get newbies started.
I’ve an old gaming PC with a decent GPU laying around and I’ve thought of doing that (currently use it for linux gaming and GPU related tasks like photo editing etc) However ,I’m currently stuck using LLMs on demand locally with ollama. Energy costs of having it powered on all time for on demand queries seems a bit overkill to me…
I put my Plex media server to work doing Ollama - it has a GPU for transcoding that’s not awful for simple LLMs.
That sounds like a great way of leveraging existing infrastructure! I host Plex together with other services in a server with intel transcoding capable CPU. I’m quite sure I would get much better performance with the GPU machine, might end up following this path!
Have to agree on that. Certainly only makes sense to have up when you are using it.
I have immich machine learning and ollama with openwebui
I use immich search a lot to find things like pictures of the side of the road to post on my community [email protected]
I almost never use the ollama though, not really sure what to do with it other than ask it dumb questions just to see what it says
I use the duckduckgo one when it auto has an answer to something I searched but its not too reliable
I was able to run a distilled version of DeepSeek on Linux. I ran it inside a PODMAN container with ROCM support (I have an AMD GPU). It wasn’t super fast but for a locally deployed and self hosted option the performance was okay. Apart from that I have deployed Fooocus for image generation in a similar manner. Currently, I am working on deploying Stable Diffusion with either ComfyUI or Automatic1111 inside a PODMAN container with ROCM support.
Didn’t know about these image generation tools, besides Stable Diffusion. Thanks!
I use OLlama & Open-WebUI, OLlama on my gaming rig and Open-WebUI as a frontend on my server.
It’s been a really powerful combo!
Would you please talk more about it. I forgot about Open-webui, but intending to start playing with. Honestly, what do you actually do with it?
I have Linkwarden pointed at my ollama deployment, so it auto tags links that I archive which is nice.
I’ve seen other people send images captured on their security cameras on frigate to ollama to get it to describe the image
There’s a bunch of other use cases I’ve thought of for coding projects, but haven’t started on any of them yet
Sex chats. For other uses, just simple searches are better 99% of the time. And for the 1%, something like the Kagis FastGPT helps to find the correct keywords.
I have the same setup, but its not very usable as my graphics card has 6gb ram. I want one with 20 or 24, as the 6b models are pain and the tiny ones don’t give me much.
Ollama was pretty easy to set up on windows, and its eqsy to download and test the models ollama has available
Sounds like you and I are in a similar place of testing.
Possibly. Been running it since last summer, but like i say the small models dont do much good for me. I have tried llama3.1 olmo2, deepseek r1 in a few variants, qwen2. Qwen2.5 coder, mistral, codellama, starcoder2, nemotron-mini, llama3.2, qwen2.5-coder, gamma2 and llava.
I use perplexity and mistral as paid, with much better quality. Openwebui is great though, but my hardware is lacking
Edit: saw that my mate is still using it a bit so i’ll update openwebu frpm 0.4 to 0.5.20 for him. Hes a bit anxious about sending data to the cloud so he dont mind the quality
Scrap that - after upgrading it went bonkers and will always use one of my «knowledges» no matter what I try. The websearch fails even with ddg as engine. Its aways seemed like the ui was made by unskilled labour, but this is just horrible. 2/10 not recommended
I messed around with home assistant and the ollama integration. I have passed on it and just use the default one with voice commands I set up. I couldn’t really get ollama to do or say anything useful. Like I asked it what’s a good time to run on a treadmill for beginners and it told me it’s not a doctor.
There are some experimental models made specifically for use with Home Assistant, for example home-llm.
Even though they are tiny 1-3B I’ve found them to work much better than even 14B general purpose models. Obviously they suck for general purpose questions just by their size alone.
That being said they’re still LLMs. I like to keep the “prefer handling commands locally” option turned on and only use the LLM as a fallback.
Like I asked it what’s a good time to run on a treadmill for beginners and it told me it’s not a doctor.
Kirkland brand meseeks energy.
Haha, that is hilarious. Sounds like it gave you some snark. afaik you have to clarify by asking again when it says such things. “I’m not asking for medical advice, but…”
deleted by creator
Sounds like ollama was loaded up with an either overly censored or plain brain dead language model. Do you know which model it was? Maybe try mistral if it fits in your computer.
I have Immich that has AI searching for my photos. Pretty useful for finding stuff actually
None currently. Wish I could afford a GPU to play with some stuff.
Well, let me know your suggestions if you wish. I took the plunge and am willing to test on your behalf, assuming I can.
