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Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

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Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#91
> Another important finding: Terry is by far the most popular name for a tortoise, followed by Turbo and Toby. Harry is a favorite for hares. All LLMs are loving alliteration.

Mode-collapse. One reason that the tuned (or tuning-contaminated models) are bad for creative writing: every protagonist and place seems to be named the same thing.

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#92
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not on these server GPUs. I'm seeing 24GB M40 cards for $200, 24GB K80 cards for $40 on eBay.

Well OK, I should have been more specific that, even for server GPUs on eBay: * Cheap * Fast * Decent amount of RAM Pick two. These old GPUs are as cheap as they are because they don’t perform well.

That's fair. From what I read though I think there is some interplay between Fast and Decent amount of RAM. Or at least there is a large falloff in performance when RAM is too small.

So Cheap and Decent amount of RAM work for me.

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#93
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200+ comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897205 > This runs the 671B model in Q4 quantization at 3.5-4.25 TPS for $2K on a single socket Epyc server motherboard using 512GB of RAM.

Runs is an overstatement though. With 4 tokens/second you can't use it on production.

I agree with elorant. Indirectly, some youtubers ended up demonstrating that it's difficult to run the best models with less than 7k$, even if NVIDIA hardware is very efficient.

In the future, I expect this to not be the case, because models will be far more efficient. At this pace, maybe even 6 months can make a difference.

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#94
post #86

For the same price ($1799) you could buy a Mac Mini with 48gb of unified memory and an m4 pro. It’d probably use less power and be much quieter to run and likely could outperform this setup in terms of tokens per second. I enjoyed the write up still, but I would probably just buy a Mac in this situation.

> likely could outperform this setup in terms of tokens per second I've heard arguments both for and against this, but they always lack concrete numbers. I'd love something like "Here is Qwen2.5 at Q4 quantization running via Ollama + these settings, and M4 24GB RAM gets X tokens/s while RTX 3090ti gets Y tokens/s", otherwise we're just propagating mostly anecdotes without any reality-checks.

I think we are somewhat still at the “fuzzy super early adopter” stage of this local LLM game and hard data is not going to be easy to come by. I almost want to use the word “hobbiest stage” where almost all of the “data” and “best practice” is anecdotal but I think we are a step above that.

Still, it’s way to early and there are simply way to many hardware and software combinations that change almost weekly to establish “the best practice hardware configuration for training / inferencing large language models locally”.

Some day there will be established guides with solid. In fact someday there will be be PC’s that specifically target LLMs and will feature all kinds of stats aimed at getting you to bust out your wallet. And I even predict they’ll come up with metrics that all the players will chase well beyond when those metrics make sense (megapixels, clock frequency, etc)… but we aren’t there yet!

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#95
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> likely could outperform this setup in terms of tokens per second I've heard arguments both for and against this, but they always lack concrete numbers. I'd love something like "Here is Qwen2.5 at Q4 quantization running via Ollama + these settings, and M4 24GB RAM gets X tokens/s while RTX 3090ti gets Y tokens/s", otherwise we're just propagating mostly anecdotes without any reality-checks.

I think we are somewhat still at the “fuzzy super early adopter” stage of this local LLM game and hard data is not going to be easy to come by. I almost want to use the word “hobbiest stage” where almost all of the “data” and “best practice” is anecdotal but I think we are a step above that. Still, it’s way to early and there are simply way to many hardware and software combinations that change almost weekly to estab…

Right, but how are we supposed to be getting anywhere else unless people start being more specific and stop leaning on anecdotes or repeating what they've heard elsewhere?

Saying "Apple seems to be somewhat equal to this other setup" doesn't really contribute to someone getting an accurate picture if it is equal or not, unless we start including raw numbers, even if they aren't directly comparable.

I don't think it's too early to say "I get X tokens/second with this setup + these settings" because then we can at least start comparing, instead of just guessing which seems to be the current SOTA.

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#96
post #10

I did something similar but using a K80 and M40 I dug up from eBay for pennies. Be advised though, stay as far away as possible from the K80 - the drivers were one of the most painful tech things I've ever had to endure, even if 24GB of VRAM for 50 bucks sounds incredibly appealing. That said, I had a decent-ish HP workstation laying around with 1200 watt power supply so I had where to put those two in. The one thing…

Curious what HP workstation you have?

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pay a premium to get the theoretical local privacy and reliability of hosting your own models. But to get commercially competitive models you need 5 figures of hardware, and then need to actually run it securely and reliably. Pay as you go with multiple vendors as fallback is a better option right now if you don't need harder privacy.

Yeah, really I'd love for my Home Assistant to be able to use a local LLM/TTS/STT which I did get working but was way too slow. Also it would fun to just throw some problems/ideas at the wall without incurring (more) cost, that's a big part of it. But each time I run the numbers I would be better off using Anthropic/OpenAI/DeepSeek/other. I think sooner or later I'll break down and buy a server for local inference ev…

> You don't know what you will do with it until you have it and it starts unlocking things in your mind

Exactly. Once the price and performance get to the level where buying stuff for local training and inferencing… that is when we will start to see the LLM break out of its current “corporate lawyer safe” stage and really begin to shake things up.

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#98

For the same price ($1799) you could buy a Mac Mini with 48gb of unified memory and an m4 pro. It’d probably use less power and be much quieter to run and likely could outperform this setup in terms of tokens per second. I enjoyed the write up still, but I would probably just buy a Mac in this situation.

For this use case though, I would prefer something more modular than Apple hardware — where down the road I could upgrade the GPUs, for example.

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#99
post #91

> Another important finding: Terry is by far the most popular name for a tortoise, followed by Turbo and Toby. Harry is a favorite for hares. All LLMs are loving alliteration. Mode-collapse. One reason that the tuned (or tuning-contaminated models) are bad for creative writing: every protagonist and place seems to be named the same thing.

Couldn't you just up the temperature/change some other parameter to get it to be more random/"creative"? It wouldn't be active/intentional randomness/novelty like what a human would do, but at least it shouldn't generate exactly the same naming.
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