How much VRAM would this require, if I would want to run this locally? I bought a 12GB Nvidia card a year ago. In general I'm having a hard time to find the actual required hardware specs for any self hosted AI model. Any tips/suggestions/recommended resources for that?
You're not finding hardware specs because there are a lot of variables at play - the degree to which the weights are quantized, how much space you want to set aside for the KV cache, extra memory needed for multimodal features, etc.
My rule of thumb is 1 byte per parameter to be comfortable (running a quantization with somewhere between 4.5 and 6 bits per parameter and leaving some room for the cache and extras), so 7 GB for 7 billion parameters. If you need a really large context you'll need more; if you want to push it you can get away with a little less.