I’d like to self host a large language model, LLM.
I don’t mind if I need a GPU and all that, at least it will be running on my own hardware, and probably even cheaper than the $20 everyone is charging per month.
What LLMs are you self hosting? And what are you using to do it?
I run the Mistral-Nemo(12B) and Mistral-Small (22B) on my GPU and they are pretty code. As others have said, the GPU memory is one of the most limiting factors. 8B models are decent, 15-25B models are good and 70B+ models are excellent (solely based on my own experience). Go for q4_K models, as they will run many times faster than higher quantization with little performance degradation. They typically come in S (Small), M (Medium) and (Large) and take the largest which fits in your GPU memory. If you go below q4, you may see more severe and noticeable performance degradation.
If you need to serve only one user at the time, ollama +Webui works great. If you need multiple users at the same time, check out vLLM.
Edit: I’m simplifying it very much, but hopefully should it is simple and actionable as a starting point. I’ve also seen great stuff from Gemma2-27B
Edit2: added links
Edit3: a decent GPU regarding bang for buck IMO is the RTX 3060 with 12GB. It may be available on the used market for a decent price and offers a good amount of VRAM and GPU performance for the cost. I would like to propose AMD GPUs as they offer much more GPU mem for their price but they are not all as supported with ROCm and I’m not sure about the compatibility for these tools, so perhaps others can chime in.
Edit4: you can also use openwebui with vscode with the continue.dev extension such that you can have a copilot type LLM in your editor.
I didn’t say it can’t. But I’m not sure how well it is optimized for it. From my initial testing it queues queries and submits them one after another to the model, I have not seen it batch compute the queries, but maybe it’s a setup thing on my side. vLLM on the other hand is designed specifically for the multi co current user use case and has multiple optimizations for it.
LLMs use a ton of VRAM, the more VRAM you have the better.
If you just need an API, then TabbyAPI is pretty great.
If you need a full UI, then Oogabooga’s TextGenration WebUI is a good place to start
Ollama, llama3.2, deepcode and a bunch of others.
Using a GPU but man they’re picky, they mostly want Nvidia gpus.
Do NOT be afraid to run on the cpu. It’s slow, but for 1 user it’s actually mostly fine.
GPT4All is a nice and easy start.
You can run this right from Windows: https://jan.ai/
You’ll need a lot of RAM, and processing is decently fast, even on a basic laptop.
edit: holy hell. Grammar.
Tip: you can copy and paste the Hugging Face link directly into the search box, and it will download the model automatically! Also, it’s pretty smart. It will load into your VRAM first, then your RAM. If you can fit everything into VRAM, you get the fastest speed. But even if you are using RAM, it’s not terribly bad; it’s still faster than you can read.
