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.

  • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    31·
    11 hours ago

    Hardware is a 5070 12GB VRAM, an AMD 5950x and 64G of DDR4 running on Nobara (Fedora spinoff).

    I use 3 models for most things: Ternary Bonsai 27b and Gemma 4 E4B Uncensored Q8_0 for everyday stuff, and Qwen Agentworld 35B A3B Q8_0 with CPU offloading for tasks that require to keep the model on track for long periods of time.

    Everyday performance is best with Bonsai for me - it comfortably fits in my VRAM and is noticeably better with staying on task than similarily sized models. But if i want it to work overnight on a task without issue, the lower speed of the agentic Qwen is outweighed by its capability to do this.

    They are allowed tool calls for websearch and reading webpages and have a sandboxed directory for R/W operations, but anything regarding command line and R/W access in other areas has to be manually authorized by me (i’m not willing to play with fire here).

    They are currently not reachable from outside, but i am currently building a smaller machine as a home server, which will then be using a 3070Ti and 32G RAM to provide probably the Bonsai Model for me on the go per VPN.

    The smaller models are here for quickly creating documents i do not care to do myself, RAG for technical documentation, creating quick python scripts for automating small tasks and teaching me RegEx and Python(mostly by analyzing the LLM output and playing around with it) and also some RP as NPC in a fantasy setting. The agentic model is currently working on cataloguing my games collection (around 36000 titles) by looking up games, their genres and descriptions and filling in blanks in the database. (Funnily, this task was refused by any model freely available because of the size of the database. Even the local models moan and bitch that it takes so long. No shit, this is why i outsource this!)