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.
Played around with it on my desktop machine. Someone’s distilled variant of Qwen 3.8-27B-Q4_K_M, on a intel12700k + RTX3090 24GB is what I use.
I haven’t adjusted the reasoning down from very high but I mostly use it for trying tweaks to half-finished coding projects I’ve lost motivation to complete many years ago. I used it to develop a very simple JS-free personal website. I have secure shell which I can access from Termux or PuTTY, but sometimes I have the llama.cpp webui insecurely accessible online for one day at a time just for fun.