Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we even have decent OCR nowadays? Any free solutions?
The qwen models not only have good OCR, they will describe pictures to you.
Local AI needs to be the norm
571–580 of 804 posts
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They will be, and that moment is not that far off. It's here, right now. I'm running quantized Qwen and Gemma on a decent, but three years old gaming rig (think RTX 3080 12GB and 32 GB RAM). Yes, it's slow, it has a small context window. But it can (given a proper harness) run through my trip photos and categorize them. It can OCR receipts and summarize spendings. It can answer simple questions, analyze code and ev…
>It's here, right now. I mean I've been forcing my good old 1080ti to run local models since a short while after llama was first leaked. But I wouldn't say "local models are here" in the same way as "year of the Linux desktop!111" Until someone can just go out and buy some sort of "AI pod" that they can take home, plug in and hit one button on a mobile app to select a model (or even just hide models behind various pe…
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They will be, and that moment is not that far off. It's here, right now. I'm running quantized Qwen and Gemma on a decent, but three years old gaming rig (think RTX 3080 12GB and 32 GB RAM). Yes, it's slow, it has a small context window. But it can (given a proper harness) run through my trip photos and categorize them. It can OCR receipts and summarize spendings. It can answer simple questions, analyze code and ev…
I'm sorry to spoil it for you, but Perl script was able to do all of that like ... 10 years ago? The out-of-the-box Shotwell manages photos quite well without any intelligence. The problem, as people mentioned above, is SOTA models cognitive and tooling abilities. Also, have you noticed as top-end Mac Studios got downgraded recently? They don't want you to have access to frontier models. And you will not have it. See…
"They" fully well know that they current frontier model are maybe 6 month ahead of what people will have access to without their control. See Deepseek as Exibit B
The reason you can't run these locally are more with the fact that those mythos sized models require extreme amount of memory and processing power to run at acceptable speeds. And neither you, nor I can afford to pay for those resources to run those models locally. A big reason is that "running locally" means running on your own hardware. And for almost everyone this means "running on hardware that will spent a big portion of its time just sleeping". Because data center and providers have higher utilization rates, they can easily outpace you. That and the fact that when they place an order it's usually for hundreds of thousands of units.
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
Local models embody the hacker spirit, constant Claude glazing is spiritually incompatible with tinkering. Don't upload your spirit to the cloud.
That’s like saying cloud computing is spiritually incompatible with tinkering.
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's already happening. Qwen3.6 and Gemma4. Basically small and medium models that are crazy well trained for their sizes. Then we have a lot of specular decoding stuff like MTP and others coming to speed up responses, and finally better quantisation to use less memory. Local LLM is the future, and the larger labs know that the open models will eat their lunch once people realise that the gap is only a few months.…
And how were those models developed and trained?
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#576It runs by now on 8GB Vram, so a Legion 5 for about 1500$ could be a good workhorse.
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry to spoil it for you, but Perl script was able to do all of that like ... 10 years ago? The out-of-the-box Shotwell manages photos quite well without any intelligence. The problem, as people mentioned above, is SOTA models cognitive and tooling abilities. Also, have you noticed as top-end Mac Studios got downgraded recently? They don't want you to have access to frontier models. And you will not have it. See…
> The out-of-the-box Shotwell manages photos quite well without any intelligence. This piqued my interest on how it does it and after briefly checking the project it seems it only has two features for automatic photo categorization. 1) it can group photos by date and 2) It has face detection and recognition that uses trained weights (so ML "intelligence").
I got away from google images and upload to my own Immich instance.
I also use an open source camera app on fdroid to degoogle that whole path.
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#578This isn't about the local models you're running on your old gaming rig, or the tesla p40 rig you build for local llm's.
This is about code leveraging the local resources where the code is running for it's AI needs. Rather than making an API call to an external AI service, the code leverages the AI capabilities built into the hardware it runs on. With modern Apple, Intel, and AMD silicon all shipping dedicated AI acceleration, this is the where IMO the focus should be heading.
How many Flops or whatever can your phone do? I bet it's enough to paint the walls of your living room, or draw a pretty good pelican on a bike.
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is like saying that 640kB is enough for anybody.
No, it isn't. I am saying that the set of tasks that can be completed by Opus 4.7 has a surprisingly large overlap with the set of tasks that can be completed by Gemma 31B. It is meaningfully equivalent in many cases. (of course if i'm being honest 640kB is fine, i'm sure tons of the world's commerce is handled by less for example, the delta between a system with 640kb of ram and a modern one is near nil for many peo…
How refreshing to hear this kind of old-school hacker thinking, in a thread where most people have given up on local computing in exchange for convenience and permanent third-party dependency.
With embedded systems affordable and ubiquitous, hopefully a growing segment of the new generation will also learn to push the limit of available hardware and see how far we can take it. As an engineer there's a satisfaction in solving things with what you got.
There's a new technique, 1-bit family of language models that can achieve up to 9x memory efficiency compared to existing models. Still multiple gigabytes for practical use I imagine, but it's great progress toward local AI, which I believe will be common in the near future. https://prismml.com/news/ternary-bonsai