I narrate notes to myself on my morning walks[1] and then run whisper locally to turn the audio into text... before having an LLM clean up my ramblings into organized notes and todo lists. I have it pretty much all local now, but I don't mind waiting a few extra seconds for it to process since it's once a day. I like the privacy because I was never comfortable telling my entire life to a remote AI company. [1] It fee…
Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops
171–180 of 385 posts
Re: Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops
#172Covers 90% of OCR needs with 10% of the effort. No API keys, scripting, or network required.
Re: Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops
#173For anyone who hasn't tried local models because they think it's too complicated or their computer can't handle it, download a single llamafile and try it out in just moments. https://future.mozilla.org/builders/news_insights/introducin... https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile They even have whisperfiles now, which is the same thing but for whisper.cpp, aka real-time voice transcription. You can also take this a…
Many setup rely on Nvidia GPUs, Intel stuff, Windows or other stuff, that I would rather not use, or are not very clear about how to set things up. What are some recommendations for running models locally, on decent CPUs and getting good valuable output from them? Is that llama stuff portable across CPUs and hardware vendors? And what do people use it for?
https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
"Cosmopolitan Libc makes C a build-once run-anywhere language, like Java, except it doesn't need an interpreter or virtual machine. Instead, it reconfigures stock GCC and Clang to output a POSIX-approved polyglot format that runs natively on Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS with the best possible performance and the tiniest footprint imaginable."
I use it just fine on a Mac M1. The only bottleneck is how much RAM you have.
I use whisper for podcast transcription. I use llama for code complete and general q&a and code assistance. You can use the llava models to ingest images and describe them.
Re: Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops
#174For anyone who hasn't tried local models because they think it's too complicated or their computer can't handle it, download a single llamafile and try it out in just moments. https://future.mozilla.org/builders/news_insights/introducin... https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile They even have whisperfiles now, which is the same thing but for whisper.cpp, aka real-time voice transcription. You can also take this a…
Many setup rely on Nvidia GPUs, Intel stuff, Windows or other stuff, that I would rather not use, or are not very clear about how to set things up. What are some recommendations for running models locally, on decent CPUs and getting good valuable output from them? Is that llama stuff portable across CPUs and hardware vendors? And what do people use it for?
> … by combining llama.cpp with Cosmopolitan Libc into one framework that collapses all the complexity of LLMs down to a single-file executable (called a "llamafile") that runs locally on most computers, with no installation.
Low cost to experiment IMO. I am personally using MacOS with an M1 chip and 64gb memory and it works perfectly, but the idea behind this project is to democratize access to generative AI and so it is at least possible that you will be able to use it.Re: Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops
#175For anyone who hasn't tried local models because they think it's too complicated or their computer can't handle it, download a single llamafile and try it out in just moments. https://future.mozilla.org/builders/news_insights/introducin... https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile They even have whisperfiles now, which is the same thing but for whisper.cpp, aka real-time voice transcription. You can also take this a…
If you're gonna go with a VS code extension and you're aiming for privacy, then I would at least recommend using the open source fork VS Codium. https://vscodium.com/
Re: Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops
#176All this will be an interesting side note in the history of language models in the next eight months when roughly 1.5 billion iPhone users will get a local language model tied seamlessly to a mid-tier cloud based language model native in their OS. What I think will be interesting is seeing which of the open models stick around and for how long when we have super easy ‘good enough’ models that provide quality integrat…
I expect people will just ship with their own model where the built-in one isn't sufficient. When people describe it as a "critical tool" i feel like I'm missing basic information about how people use computers and interact with the world. In what way is it critical for anything? It's still just a toy at this point.
Re: Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops
#177May as well ask here: what is the best way to use something like an LLM as a personal knowledge base? I have a few thousand book, papers and articles collected over the last decade. And while I have meticulously categorised them for fast lookup, it's getting harder and harder to search for the desired info, especially in categories which I might not have explored recently. I do have a 4070 (12 GB VRAM), so I thought…
Re: Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops
#178I narrate notes to myself on my morning walks[1] and then run whisper locally to turn the audio into text... before having an LLM clean up my ramblings into organized notes and todo lists. I have it pretty much all local now, but I don't mind waiting a few extra seconds for it to process since it's once a day. I like the privacy because I was never comfortable telling my entire life to a remote AI company. [1] It fee…
I would be greatly interested in knowing how you set all that up if you felt like sharing the specifics.
I'm on a Mac and I found the easiest way to run & use local models is Ollama as it has a rest interface: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/docs/api.md
I just have a local script that pulls the audio file from Voice Memos (after it syncs from my iPhone), runs it through openai's whisper (really the best at voice to speech; excellent results) and then makes sense of it all with a prompt that asks for organized summary notes and todos in GH flavored markdown. That final output goes into my Obsidian vault. The model I use is llama3.1 but haven't spent much time testing others. I find you don't really need the largest models since the task is to organize text rather than augment it with a lot of external knowledge.
Humorously the harder part of the process was finding where the hell Voice Memos actually stores these audio files. I wish you could set the location yourself! They live deep inside ~/Library/Containers. Voice Memos has no export feature, but I found you can drag any audio recording out of the left sidebar to the desktop or a folder. So I just drag the voice memo into a folder my script watches and then it runs the automation.
If anyone has another, better option for recording your voice on an iPhone, let me know! The nice thing about all this is you don't even have to start / stop the recording ever on your walk... just leave it going. Dead space and side conversations and commands to your dog are all well handled and never seem to pollute my notes.