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.



That infographic looks to be for a VPS deployment, which is where the cost would be coming from. They’re comparing to a $9,000+ OpenAI payment.
I’m new to Lemmy so when I tried to post something it said I need an image so I just picked a random one which looked vaguely like self hosting AI