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.
I’d like to, as I currently drop $20/month on Claude without perhaps using it to the extent that my money would let me, but what’s “good” that can run on a 16GB RAM, i5 12th gen, 3070-equipped desktop?
Gemma 4 12b unified as a q6 gguf fits with about 24k context inside your vram. koboldcpp+sillytavern works well on the software side.
Sc117
Might wanna try a ternary model, which are a lot denser in comparison.
Ternary Bonsai 27b is 7.17GB in size, which might fit on your 3070 depending on how much free VRAM you have (and with CPU offloading it should work in all cases). You can also try their edge-computing model designed to be working on smart phones here (iPhones seems to have a limit of 6Gb RAM max for such things) - that one is less than 4GB in size, which should fit in any case. In my experience they do work very well compared to other models in that size class.
Be aware that they need a specific llama.cpp build found here
This is the question to spend your Claude tokens on. It helped me tweak my setup to get better performance.