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 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.
STEM questions 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 daily use, I prefer using mistral small 24b and treating it like a local search engine with the legitimacy of wikipedia. Its a starting point to ask questions about general things I don’t know about or want advice on, 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.
Lets say I want an overview of how can I repair small holes forming in concrete, or general ideas on how to invest financially, how to change fluids in a car, how much fat and protein is in an egg, ect.
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 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
I have this exact same setup. Open Web UI has more features than I’ve been able to use such as functions and pipelines.
I use it to share my LLMs across my network. It has really good user management so I can set up a user for my wife or brother in law and give them general use LLM while my dad and I can take advantage of Coding-tuned models.
The code formatting and code execution functions are great. It’s overall a great UI.
Ive used LLMs to rewrite code, help format PowerPoint slides, summarize my notes from work, create D&D characters, plan lessons, etc
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.
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.
Yeah. I have a mini PC with an AMD GPU. Even if I were to buy a big GPU I couldn’t use it. That frustrates me, because I’d love to play around with some models locally. I refuse to use anything hosted by other people.
Your M.2 port can probably fit an M.2 to PCIe adapter and you can use a GPU with that - ollama supports AMD GPUs just fine nowadays (well, as well as it can, rocm is still very hit or miss)
Oh, then I need to give it another try.
Check rocm’s supported cards, oh and after you install rocm, restart your computer - made that mistake when I was doing it and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working.
Most LLM projects support Vulkan if you have enough VRAM
I have Immich that has AI searching for my photos. Pretty useful for finding stuff actually
Once I changed the default model, immich search became amazing. I want to show it off to people but alas, way too many NSFW pics in my library. I would create a second “clean” version to show off to people but I’ve been too lazy.
Can’t you tag the NSFW to filter it out?
LMStudio is pretty much the standard. I think it’s opensource except for the UI. Even if you don’t end up using it long-term, it’s great for getting used to a lot of the models.
Otherwise there’s OpenWebUI that I would imagine would work as a docker compose, as I think there’s ARM images for OWU and ollama
Well they are fully closed source except for the open source project they are a wrapper on. The open source part is llama.cpp
Fair enough, but it’s damn handy and simple to use. And I don’t know how to do speculative decoding with ollama, which massively speeds up the models for me.
Their software is pretty nice. That’s what I’d recommand to someone who doesn’t want to tinker. It’s just a shame they don’t want to open source their software and we have to reinvent the wheel 10 times. If you are willing to tinker a bit koboldcpp + openewebui/librechat is a pretty nice combo.
That koboldcpp is pretty interesting. Looks like I can load a draft model for spec decode as well as a pile of other things.
What local models have you been using for coding? I’ve been disappointed with things like deepseek-coder and the qwen-coder, it’s not even a patch on Claude, but that damn cost for anthropic has been killing me.
As much as I’d like to praise the open-weight models. Nothing comes close to Claude sonnet in my experience too. I use local models when info are sensitive and claude when the problem requires being somewhat competent.
What setup do you use for coding? I might have a tip for minimizing claude cost you depending on what your setup is.
I’m using vscode/Roocode with Gosucoder shortprompt, with Requesty providing models. Generally I’ll use R1 to outline a project and Claude to implement. The shortprompt seems to reduce the context quite a bit and hence the cost. I’ve heard about Cursor but haven’t tried it yet.
When you’re using local models, which ones are you using? The ones I mention don’t seem to give me much I can use, but I’m also probably asking more of them because I see what Claude can do. It might also be a problem with how Roocode uses them, though when I just jump into a chat and ask it to spit out code, I don’t get much better.
If you are willing to pay 10$ a month. You should get GithubCopilot, it provides near unlimited claude 3.5 usage. RooCode can hook into the github copilot api, and use it for its generations.
I use Qwen Coder and Mistral small locally too. It works ok, but its nowhere near GPT/Claude in terms of response quality.
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…
Have to agree on that. Certainly only makes sense to have up when you are using it.
I spun up ollama and paperless-gpt to add ai ocr sidecar to paperless-ngx. It’s okay. It can read handwritten stuff okayish, which is better than tesseract (doesnt read hand writing at all), so I throw handwritten stuff to it, but the difference on typed text is marginal in my single day I spent testing 3 different models on a few different typed receipts.
Which specific models did you try and how would you rank each is usability?
I tried minicpm-v, granite3.2-vision, and mistral.
Granite didn’t work with paperless-gpt at all. Mistral worked sometimes but also just kept running sometimes and didn’t finish within a reasonable time (15 minutes for 2 pages). minicpm-v finishes every time, but i just looked at some of the results and seems as though it’s not even worth keeping it running either. I suppose maybe the first one I tried that gave me a good impression was a fluke.
To be fair, I’m a noob at local ai, and I also don’t have a good gpu (gtx1650). So these failures could all be self induced. I like the idea of ai powered ocr so I’ll probably try again in the future…
I find your experiments inspired. Thank you! I’m learning about this myself on an rtx and excited to discuss on my little podcast.james.network one of these days. Been using paperless minus the AI functionality so far. About to start testing different AI services on an arm64 device with 16gb ram that claims some level of AI support; will see how that goes. Let me know if there are any other specific services/models you’d recommend or are curious about.
Sure, and let me know how it goes for you. I’m on a dell r720xd, about to upgrade my ram from 128 to 296 gb… don’t want to spend the money for a new gpu right now.
I’ll report back after I try again.
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!
Can anyone suggest a model for light coding? I’m on a 3070 mobile.
Qwen coder or the new gemma3.
But at this size using privacy respecting api might be both cheaper and lead to better results.
Claude is the standard that all others are judged by. But it’s not cheap.
Gemini is pretty good, and Qwen-coder isn’t bad. I’d suggest you watch a few vids on GosuCoder’s YT channel to see what works for you, he reviews a pile of them and it’s quite up to date.
And if you use VScode, I highly recommend the Roocode extension. Gosucoder also goes into revising the roocode prompt to reduce costs for Claude. Another extension is Cline.
