Obviously there’s not a lot of love for OpenAI and other corporate API generative AI here, but how does the community feel about self hosted models? Especially stuff like the Linux Foundation’s Open Model Initiative?
I feel like a lot of people just don’t know there are Apache/CC-BY-NC licensed “AI” they can run on sane desktops, right now, that are incredible. I’m thinking of the most recent Command-R, specifically. I can run it on one GPU, and it blows expensive API models away, and it’s mine to use.
And there are efforts to kill the power cost of inference and training with stuff like matrix-multiplication free models, open source and legally licensed datasets, cheap training… and OpenAI and such want to shut down all of this because it breaks their monopoly, where they can just outspend everyone scaling , stealiing data and destroying the planet. And it’s actually a threat to them.
Again, I feel like corporate social media vs fediverse is a good anology, where one is kinda destroying the planet and the other, while still niche, problematic and a WIP, kills a lot of the downsides.
I think it’s amazing. I’m running Ollama with a bunch of open-source llms. You’re right. It’s so good. The problem is keeping up to date on what the newest development is.
The pace of progress is so fast and it’s really difficult to know what the cool kids are experimenting with this moment.
Oh, and if your hardware is AMD or Nvidia, you should really give exllama a shot.
If it’s Apple, you should investigate kobold.cpp and more “nitty gritty” llama.cpp backends.
I have largely negative feelings towards ollama for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that it hides a lot of the knobs to get the absolute best out of LLMs, and understand how they work.
I’m running Nvidia on Ubuntu. I’ll give exllama a shot.
I’d recommend TabbyAPI with your favorite frontend, anything that works with OpenAI.
Or exui (which is what I tend to use) but is a bit more manual. text-gen-web-ui has better samplers, but its IMO more clanky and crufty, and really slow at long context.
Also, uh, you’ll have to be careful about picking a model, you have to fit it to your GPU instead of letting ollama do it for you. I view this as a positive, as it forces you to search more a more optimal fit.
I manually specify what models to pull. I’m not running anything too crazy. My largest model is gemma27B. But I’ve worked with dolphin-mistral which was fun.
If you have a 24GB card, just go straight to the most recent Command R, a 3.75bpw-4bpw quantization. It’s incredible, and you can do the full 131K context on a 24GB GPU easy.
Gemma 27B Is actually quite good, but “narrow.” Its super low context and seems to be hyper optimized for short chatbot-arena style questions.
Gemma 27B Is actually quite good, but “narrow.” Its super low context and seems to be hyper optimized for short chatbot-arena style questions.
This is the stuff I love to know so thanks for sharing. I will be pulling Command R tomorrow.
Good! So Command-R excels at “RAG” style tasks like asking questions about a huge document, continuing a long story or so on. You should also read up on its super intricate system prompt format, which can steer it quite well.
I dunno about code, I tend to use Mistral Code 22B (or deepseek v2 API) for that.
I am happy to ramble on about this stuff, just ask.
Honestly a big problem is that the community for filtering the news has “collapsed.”
The only reasonable congregation was basically /r/localllama, and due to a number of factors (including, apparently, a Reddit bug that was driving away traffic according to a mod), and its shrunken a ton.
Twitter, linkedin, youtube and such are awful and full of straight up lies. Huggingface is just impossible to navigate and filter. There are a few niche aggregators, but they come and go.
Hence I was hoping lemmy would grow its existing ML communities, but most of lemmy seems broadly anti AI, even anti open source AI, hence this post to get a feel if that’s true.
I read localllama through redlib but I don’t contribute. I am not technical enough to contribute and I don’t understand the math.
I have been looking at YouTube for some videos to try to explain it, but I haven’t found anything that is in the sweet spot between “video for non-technical people” and “video for people with PhD and quantum physics”
It’s a giant mess. Even the technical vidoes tend to be theoretical, and are either obsolete or do nothing to help you actually run them.
I would know nothing if I hadn’t been following the community since the Pygmalion/ESRGAN days
I’ve spent the past 2 years looking for the open source AI community, but haven’t really found it. I’ve tinkered with Stable Diffusion and Ollama and I want to learn more, but haven’t found the right places online yet.
I’ll give you one hint, a lot of the community is locked away in various Discords.
This is one of the many reasons I hate Discord.
And just to be more helpful, I can point you in the right direction depending on your hardware.
Yeah, I hate Discord too but that has been the best place I’ve found the best information, but even then it doesn’t really feel like a community.
I’m running on an Apple M1 at the moment, likely to upgrade to an M4 when it is released.
What RAM capacity?
Honestly, if LLMs are your focus, you should just upgrade to a used M2 Max (or Ultra) when the M4 comes out, lol. Basically the only thing that matters is RAM capacity and bandwidth, and the M2 is just going to be faster and better than a similarly priced M4.
Or better yet, upgrade to and AMD Strix Halo. This will buy you into linux and the cuda ecosystem (through AMD rocm), which is going to open a lot of doors and save headaches (while admittedly creating other headaches).
Really into local hosting and open LLM’s I’ve largely stepped back due to ‘fatigue’. I’ve downloaded tweaked and reshuffle models and programs then a couple months will pass and it’s lept forward again. Which is good but I figured I’d wait until it slowed a bit.
I will say the fact I can run a decent 7b and even 10b models and get decent responses and times with a 3070 is impressive. AnythingLLM has been a really handy program for me. Still in development but it’s been neat working with RAG. I also moved from textgen to LMStudio and am really liking it. I like textgen but I felt it got a bit side tracked. A lot of good suggestions in here so cheers OP.
You can probably run Nemo 12B pretty quickly, though llama 3.1/gemma 9b finetunes may be better tbh. Deepseek lite v2 code with offloading would still be fast, even though its a 16B, since its such a heavy MoE.
Hardware is such a limiting factor now. Once quad-channel APUs and such start coming out, I feel like it will open up the space, so people don’t have to hunt down used 3090s and built desktops around them.
Last I tried was a fimbul merge for 10.4b with rope for creative writing which was great but yeah 3.1 is where I’ve landed lately. I’ll have to check out nemo! Like you mentioned I was sitting on money to grab a 3090 but I think I’ll wait for rtx50xx to drive down prices or just for dedicated hardware. I’ll be sure to keep an eye the AI subs though, clearly there’s a community for it here that’s interested in discussion.
Oh and I forgot to mention, instead of a 5090, buy AMD Strix Halo if its any good.
I cannot emphasize how awesome 128GB on a fast APU would be. That opens up (admittedly slow, but usable) inference of “huge” models like Mistral Large, and very fast inference of large MoE models like 8x22B.
Good tips, thanks!! I’ll definitely check it out.
rtx50xx
Don’t,Nvidia is going to price gouge the snot out of it. Honestly, if you want to buy new, just get a 7900 XTX. Screw Nvidia’s pricing on new cards, lol.
fimbul merge for 10.4b
Speaking as someone who’s done a lot of merging, the “upscaling” merges are not great. Rope scaling the context is not either. You are better off finding models that were trained at the parameter count and context length you want in the first place, and there is a lot more choice these days.
Oh fuck buying Nvidia new, I was going to see if it depressed 40xx prices or even further for 3090 but I’m not sure it would.
Neat didn’t know that about rope, as you can guess largely due to having fuck all memory to work with. Is AMD viable with LLMs now? Honestly if I can make it work with an AMD GPU I just may because I agree screw Nvidia.
For inference? AMD is more finicky to setup but totally fine once you do. 7900 XTX prices can be very good.
I feel like 3090s have bottomed out, as they are just getting more rare now, and 4090s are so freaking expensive to start with I’m not sure how much they’ll come down.
Another feature you might not be aware of, that people use now, is quantized KV cache. With it, I can run a 19GB 35B model and still fit 131K context into vram, with basically no quality loss.
How are you people running cuda kernels?
rocm
exllama, llama.cpp, vllm/aphrodite, (I think) sglang, they all support it now.
I’m in favor of a “ML-GPL”, where models must be made available for free to those whose data was used to train them.
Practically that just means “open weights” lol. Easier to just do that than track all the sources.
Not that I disagree.
But one sticking point is allowing commercial use, as many companies do like noncommercial licenses so they can make money off them.
Open source is good and important, but its still a solution without a problem.
And even if you get to a point where performance without large dedicated machines is acceptable, it’s still a power drain.
I dunno, I keep a 35B open on my desktop all day just to bounce ideas off it, ask it stuff, easy queries, like a instant personal assistant.
And the feel is totally different when its yours. Long context responses on huge documents are instant because it’s cached, and I can repeat quieries over and over again without any worry. I can dig in and mess with the system prompt ,even the manual formatting, in ways that API models just don’t like. I can finetune smaller models for styles, thoug I don’t do this a ton. And I don’t feel weird about sending certain things over the internet to be datamined.
The visual media models tend to be more for crude entertainment, yeah.
Matmul free LLMs are theoretically incredibly power efficient, if accelerators for them ever come out.
Yes clearly you don’t know, thanks for that tidbit about yourself.
I heard you, and I disagree, I think they’re already useful and can be very reasonably power efficient.
OK, so the reaction here seems pretty positive.
But when I bring this up in other threads (or even on Reddit in the few subreddits I still use) the reaction is overwhelmingly negative. Like, I briefly mentioned fixing the video quality issues of an old show in an other fandom with diffusion models, and I felt like I was going to get banned and doxxed.
I see it a lot here too, in any thread about OpenAI or whatever.
I’m against all AI.
This is fair. So much about it is awful, even with more “open” AI.
But my counter argument is it’s happening anyway. And would you rather be stuck with Fediverse, or Facebook? Because if everyone keeps opposing all AI, we’re gonna be stuck with AI Facebook.
I’ll put it this way. When I call a company customer service, and they say “in a few words, tell us your issue”, what I do is say BLARHVSYKKUCAHN
And they say “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand that. Please state the reason for your call.”
And again I say “AJNCTHDTKVFRIDJXRI”
And they say “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand that. Please state the reason for your call.”
And I say “JCFYHCTJCZUIVDJ”
at this point, they either hang up on me, in which case I go see them in person.
OR
They say “I’m having trouble understanding you. Please wait while I connect you to someone who can help.”
The reason I do this is because I want to slow any advancement of any AI service, and fill them with garbage data.
And since the 90s I never use my real name online. If I’m signing up for something at Walmart, my name is Bob Wallemarte. Just enough to slip by their automated reject systems, but enough that if I start getting spam for Bob Wallemarte, I know Walmart sold my information.
Then when I sign up for something in the future, I use Walmarts local store address as my home address. So when Walmart wants to mail me spam, they mail it to themselves.
…In that case, shouldn’t you be OK with offline models? No data harvesting is a benefit.
Here to stay all the same.
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