Does anyone run their own AI service?
If so,
Which one?
What hardware?
Do you have a way to access it from outside or from a phone?
And, if you’re open to sharing, what do you do with it?
I know AI-enabling hardware is insanely expensive right now, but some of the smaller (<32GB) more efficient models (think deepseek- or qwen-based) don’t absolutely need specialized hardware to run and perform well enough for many purposes.
I am so aware of the absolutely abysmal privacy practices of basically all AI companies that I’m not comfortable using them to help me with web searches and the such, because there’s no way that all this information won’t be going into a profile. This makes me want to have my own “helper” service.
Very similar, but I’m using Gemma4 12b. I could run 26b but that would exhaust my vram after a short interaction. And ollama. Open WebUI + Home Assistant hooked up with it, a couple very basic scripts I threw together, and connected to Kagi.
I’m trying to get my folks off the Gemini/Google bandwagon for the privacy aspect, but also because it’s just cool from a tech geek perspective. For me, any questions throughout the day that I want info on, but not enough to do a deep-dive for an hour+, gets fed to Steve, my models name. Or I’ll use it as a springboard and then properly read the citations for more info. And I feed it HA automations when I get stuck scratching my head on an edge case or whatever - it’s alright but helps me explain what I want from the automation, and when it understands my goal, great, and when it doesn’t I reflect on what I have setup and can usually go ‘ah ha’ and fix the issue. It’s like a rubber ducky/pair programmer that you can both think is an idiot sometimes, but it doesn’t judge you when you’re the idiot.
That’s a pretty good way to describe those kinds of models. Somewhere between rubber duck debugging and a really lazy intern. Better than an algorithm, faster than a human, but less trustworthy than an intern. It’s great if you know how and when to use it. Maybe it’ll become an intern soon enough, but for now let’s focus on decompiling adobe into bankruptcy.