Live data from Hacker News

Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS

blog.6nok.org

21–30 of 276 posts

Re: Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS

#22
post #16

I really like On-Device AI on iPhone (also runs on Mac): https://ondevice-ai.app in addition to LM Studio. It has a nice interface, with multiple prompt integration, and a good selection of models. Also the developer is responsive.

But it has a paid recurring subscription, which is hard to justify for something that runs entirely locally.

Re: Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS

#23
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm looking for an html page with a button "Select LLM". After pressing that button and selecting a local LLM from disk, it would show an input field where you can type your question and then it would use the given LLM to create the answer. I'm not sure what OpenWebUI is, but if it was what I mean, they would surely have the page live and not ask users to install Docker etc.

You should install it, because it's exactly what you just described. Edit: From a UI perspective, it's exactly what you described. There's a dropdown where you select the LLM, and there's a ChatGPT-style chatbox. You just docker-up and go to town. Maybe I don't understand the rest of the request, but I can't imagine a software where a webpage exists and it just magically has LLMs available in the browser with no inst…

It doesn't seem exactly like what they are describing. The end-user interface is what they are describing but it sounds like they want the actual LLM to run in the browser (perhaps via webgpu compute shaders). Open WebUI seems to rely on some external executor like ollama/llama.cpp, which naturally can still be self-hosted but they are not executing INSIDE the browser.

Re: Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS

#24
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm looking for an html page with a button "Select LLM". After pressing that button and selecting a local LLM from disk, it would show an input field where you can type your question and then it would use the given LLM to create the answer. I'm not sure what OpenWebUI is, but if it was what I mean, they would surely have the page live and not ask users to install Docker etc.

You should install it, because it's exactly what you just described. Edit: From a UI perspective, it's exactly what you described. There's a dropdown where you select the LLM, and there's a ChatGPT-style chatbox. You just docker-up and go to town. Maybe I don't understand the rest of the request, but I can't imagine a software where a webpage exists and it just magically has LLMs available in the browser with no inst…

> You should install it, because it's exactly what you just described.

Not OP, but it really isn't what' they're looking for. Needing to install stuff VS simply going to a web page are two very different things.

Re: Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS

#25
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Open WebUI something like you are looking for? The design has some awkwardness, but overall it's incorporated a ton of great features. https://openwebui.com/

No, I'm looking for an html page with a button "Select LLM". After pressing that button and selecting a local LLM from disk, it would show an input field where you can type your question and then it would use the given LLM to create the answer. I'm not sure what OpenWebUI is, but if it was what I mean, they would surely have the page live and not ask users to install Docker etc.

I think what you want is this: https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm

Re: Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS

#27
So far I've not run into the kind of use cases that local LLMs can convincingly provide without making me feel like I'm using the first ever ChatGPT from 2022, in that they are limited and quite limiting. I am curious about what use cases the community has found that work for them. The example that one user has given in this thread about their local LLM inventing a Sun Tzu interview is exactly the kind of limitation I'm talking about. How does one use a local LLM to do something actually useful?

Re: Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS

#28
post #2

Is anyone working on software that lets you run local LLMs in the browser? In theory, it should be possible, shouldn't it? The page could hold only the software in JavaScript that uses WebGL to run the neural net. And offer an "upload" button that the user can click to select a model from their file system. The button would not upload the model to a server - it would just let the JS code access it to convert it into…

This is an in-browser llamacpp implementation: https://github.com/ngxson/wllama

And related is the whisper implementation: https://ggml.ai/whisper.cpp/

Re: Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS

#29

So far I've not run into the kind of use cases that local LLMs can convincingly provide without making me feel like I'm using the first ever ChatGPT from 2022, in that they are limited and quite limiting. I am curious about what use cases the community has found that work for them. The example that one user has given in this thread about their local LLM inventing a Sun Tzu interview is exactly the kind of limitation…

The same way you use a cloud LLM.

Re: Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS

#30

So far I've not run into the kind of use cases that local LLMs can convincingly provide without making me feel like I'm using the first ever ChatGPT from 2022, in that they are limited and quite limiting. I am curious about what use cases the community has found that work for them. The example that one user has given in this thread about their local LLM inventing a Sun Tzu interview is exactly the kind of limitation…

Local models can do embedding very well, which is useful for things like building a screenshot manager for example.
Post reply on HN