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 wouldn’t say I ‘run’ it, but I mess around with it
I have a base level Mac Mini I got before the price increase a few years ago, also from when models were smaller and my ambitions were less. I’ve contemplated upgrading it, but I have other things to spend my money on.
M4 processor, 16 gb ram, 256 gb storage, and a 4tb external HDD drive (an old NAS drive).
It’s fine. It’s mostly a docker machine, but I do throw AI tasks at it a few times a week. Mostly stuff that I just let it chew on for 5-10 minutes and come back to.
I run openwebui, and have several models I bounce between. I mostly run Gemma4 (Google) and Granite4.2:8B (IBM).
Editing to add: the self hosted version of all these models, via llama, just in case that was unclear.