I’ve been looking into self-hosting LLMs or stable diffusion models using something like LocalAI and / or Ollama and LibreChat.
Some questions to get a nice discussion going:
- Any of you have experience with this?
- What are your motivations?
- What are you using in terms of hardware?
- Considerations regarding energy efficiency and associated costs?
- What about renting a GPU? Privacy implications?
Have been using llama.cpp, whisper.cpp, Stable Diffusion for a long while (most often the first one). My “hub” is a collection of bash scripts and a ssh server running.
I typically use LLMs for translation, interactive technical troubleshooting, advice on obscure topics, sometimes coding, sometimes mathematics (though local models are mostly terrible for this), sometimes just talking. Also music generation with ChatMusician.
I use the hardware I already have - a 16GB AMD card (using ROCm) and some DDR5 RAM. ROCm might be tricky to set up for various libraries and inference engines, but then it just works. I don’t rent hardware - don’t want any data to leave my machine.
My use isn’t intensive enough to warrant measuring energy costs.