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.
We did the maths. Didn’t seem worthwhile and the payback period was a very long time
I think the value is in the privacy. You can hook it up to knowledge and capabilities you’d never share with a cloud AI. But if your use case is strictly coding, I agree.
True but if you happen to buy broken macs you can just take thier board with all the unified ram it’s become quite the thing recently even Asus duo with 32gb Intel 9 core ultra board’s have been started to be repurposed like mini pcs for ai use. For about 1000usd get the same level of intelligence as o1 high with gemma 26b I think with enough left over for kv cache.