Does anyone run their own AI service?

If so,

Which one?

What hardware?

Do you have a way to access it from outside or from a phone?

And, if you’re open to sharing, what do you do with it?

I know AI-enabling hardware is insanely expensive right now, but some of the smaller (<32GB) more efficient models (think deepseek- or qwen-based) don’t absolutely need specialized hardware to run and perform well enough for many purposes.

I am so aware of the absolutely abysmal privacy practices of basically all AI companies that I’m not comfortable using them to help me with web searches and the such, because there’s no way that all this information won’t be going into a profile. This makes me want to have my own “helper” service.

  • aurion@piefed.aurionblack.comEnglish
    81·
    17 hours ago

    Yes! I’ve got quite a few projects going right now. Probably too many of them to keep track

    I am the only user, so it’s relatively easy to run multiple models for what ever task. Ollama is pretty good at balancing which models are working at what time to not bog down they system

    I’m running gpt-oss 120 for a general purpose Hermes agent. Out of the box, it was ok. Not very snappy, but it was one of the best ones for orchestrating other agents.

    Glm flash (4.something?) does pretty good as well.

    I’ve found a hybrid of cloud and local is the best solution. Use local for smaller or more defined tasks. Use cloud for orchestrating, planning, and…fixing the local agents mistakes lol

    I’ve got an LLM maintained Obsidian wiki that is written and edited by a few Ollama agents based on chats via my own self hosted matrix instance. I’ve taken it to a point where I’m pretty happy with the results. But I think if I had enough time and energy, I could really dial it in.

    One of my favorite use cases for this is when I’m researching topics like UFOs/high strangeness/conspiracy theories. I have my very own LLM maintained Obsidian vault filled with curated notes and links to sources.

    Literally, no one cares about this and they think it’s stupid and I’m stupid and I should feel bad for spending time on this or having the audacity of sharing it… they just don’t appreciate the amount of work and knowledge it took to get what I have set up.

    I think it’s cool as fuck. I geek out every time that it works.

    Oh, forgot to mention I am running it on a Mac studio with 96 gig of unified memory. I think it’s an M3 ultra chip.