As cool and neato as I find AI to be, I haven't really found a good use case for it in the selfhosting/homelabbing arena. Most of my equipment is ancient and lacking the GPU necessary to drive that bus.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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7b is the smallest I've found useful. I'd try a smaller quant before going lower, if I had super small vram.
It'll work for quick bash scripts and one-off things like that. But there's not usually enough context window unless you're using a 24G GPU or such.
Yeah shell scripts are one of those things that you never remember how to do something and have to always look it up!
Snippets are a great use.
I use StableCode on my phone as a programming tutor for learning Python. It is outstanding in both speed and in accuracy for this task. I have it generate definitions which I copy and paste into Anki the flashcard app. Whenever I'm on a bus or airplane I just start studying. Wish that it could also quiz me interactively.
Please be very careful. The python code it'll spit out will most likely be outdated, not work as well as it should (the code isn't "thought out" as if a human did it.
If you want to learn, dive it, set yourself tasks, get stuck, and f around.
I installed Llama. I've not found any use for it. I mean, I've asked it for a recipe because recipe websites suck, but that's about it.
you can do a lot with it.
I heated my office with it this past winter.
Have you tried RAG? I believe that they are actually pretty good for searching and compiling content from RAG.
So in theory you could have it connect to all of you local documents and use it for quick questions. Or maybe connected to your signal/whatsapp/sms chat history to ask questions about past conversations
No, what is it? How do I try it?
RAG is basically like telling an LLM "look here for more info before you answer" so it can check out local documents to give an answer that is more relevant to you.
You just search "open web ui rag" and find plenty kf explanations and tutorials
I think RAG will be surpassed by LLMs in a loop with tool calling (aka agents), with search being one of the tools.
LLMs that train LoRas on the fly then query themselves with the LoRa applied
Sorry, I am just gonne dump you some links from my bookmarks that were related and interesting to read, cause I am traveling and have to get up in a minute, but I've been interested in this topic for a while. All of the links discuss at least some usecases. For some reason microsoft is really into tiny models and made big breakthroughs there.
https://reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1cdrw7p/what_are_the_potential_uses_of_small_less_than_3b/
https://github.com/microsoft/BitNet
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-2-the-surprising-power-of-small-language-models/
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/the-phi-3-small-language-models-with-big-potential/
I've run a few models that I could on my GPU. I don't think the smaller models are really good enough. They can do stuff, sure, but to get anything out of it, I think you need the larger models.
They can be used for basic things, though. There are coder specific models you can look at. Deepseek and qwen coder are some popular ones
I haven't actually found the coder-specific ones to be much (if at all) better than the generic ones. I wish I could have. Hopefully LLMs can become more efficient in the very near future.
Been coming to similar conclusions with some local adventures. It's decent but not as able to process larger contexts.
Converting free text to standardized forms such as json
Oh—do you happen to have any recommendations for that?
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B
I've used smollm2:135m for projects in DBeaver building larger queries. The box it runs on is Intel HD 530 graphics with an old i5-6500T processor. Doesn't seem to really stress the CPU.
UPDATE: I apologize to the downvoter for not masochistically wanting to build a 1000 line bulk insert statement by hand.
How, exactly, do you have Intel HD graphics, found on Intel APUs, on a Ryzen AMD system?
Sorry, I was trying to find parts for my daughter's machine while doing this (cheap Minecraft build). I corrected my comment.
I've integrated mine into Home Assistant, which makes it easier to use their voice commands.
I haven't done a ton with it yet besides set it up, though, since I'm still getting proxmox configured on my gaming rig.
What are you using for voice integration? I really don't want to buy and assemble their solution if I don't have to
I just use the companion app for now. But I am designing a HAL9000 system for my home.
I think that's a size where it's a bit more than a good autocomplete. Could be part of a chain for retrieval augmented generation. Maybe some specific tasks. And there are small machine learning models that can do translation or sentiment analysis, though I don't think those are your regular LLM chatbots... And well, you can ask basic questions and write dialogue. Something like "What is an Alpaca?" will work. But they don't have much knowledge under 8B parameters and they regularly struggle to apply their knowledge to a given task at smaller sizes. At least that's my experience. They've become way better at smaller sizes during the last year or so. But they're very limited.
I'm not sure what you intend to do. If you have some specific thing you'd like an LLM to do, you need to pick the correct one. If you don't have any use-case... just run an arbitrary one and tinker around?
Currently I've been using a local AI (a couple different kinds) to first - take the audio from a Twitch stream; so that I have context about the conversation, convert it to text, and then use a second AI; an LLM fed the first AIs translation + twitch chat and store 'facts' about specific users so that they can be referenced quickly for a streamer who has ADHD in order to be more personable.
That way, the guy can ask User X how their mothers surgery went. Or he can remember that User K has a birthday coming up. Or remember that User G's son just got a PS5 for Christmas, and wants a specific game.
It allows him to be more personable because he has issues remembering details about his users. It's still kind of a big alpha test at the moment, because we don't know the best way to display the 'data', but it functions as an aid.
Hey, you're treating that data with the respect it demands, right? And you definitely collected consent from those chat participants before you Hoover'd up their [re-reads example] extremely Personal Identification Information AND Personal Health Information, right? Because if you didn't, you're in violation of a bunch of laws and the Twitch TOS.
If I say my name is Doo doo head, in a public park, and someone happens to overhear it - they can do with that information whatever they want. Same thing. If you wanna spew your personal life on Twitch, there are bots that listen to all of the channels everywhere on twitch. They aren't violating any laws, or Twitch TOS. So, *buzzer* WRONG.
Right now, the same thing is being done to you on Lemmy. And Reddit. And Facebook. And everywhere else.
Look at a bot called "FrostyTools" for Twitch. Reads Twitch chat, Uses an AI to provide summaries of chat every 30 minutes or so. If that's not violating TOS, then neither am I. And thousands upon thousands of people use FrostyTools.
I have the consent of the streamer, I have the consent of Twitch (through their developer API), and upon using Twitch, you give the right to them to collect, distribute, and use that data at their whim.
So, buzzer WRONG.
Quite arrogant after you just constructed a faulty comparison.
If I say my name is Doo doo head, in a public park, and someone happens to overhear it - they can do with that information whatever they want. Same thing.
That's absolutely not the same thing. Overhearing something that is in the background is fundamentally different from actively recording everything going on in a public space. You film yourself or some performance in a park and someone happens to be in the background? No problem. You build a system to identify everyone in the park and collect recordings of their conversations? Absolutely a problem, depending on the jurisdiction. The intent of the recording(s) and the reasonable expectations of the people recorded are factored in in many jurisdictions, and being in public doesn't automatically entail consent to being recorded.
See for example https://www.freedomforum.org/recording-in-public/
(And just to clarify: I am not arguing against your explanation of Twitch's TOS, only against the bad comparison you brought.)
You're both getting side-tracked by this discussion of recording. The recording is likely legal in most places.
It's the processing of that unstructured data to extract and store personal information that is problematic. At that point you go from simply recording a conversation of which you are a part, to processing and storing people's personal data without their knowledge, consent, or expectation.
True.
Although in Germany for example it can also be an issue when recording. If you have a security camera pointed at a public space (that can include the sidewalk infront of your house), passersby can sue you to take it down and potentially get you fined. Even pretending to constantly record such an area can yield that result.
You build a system to identify everyone in the park and collect recordings of their conversations? Absolutely a problem, depending on the jurisdiction.
Literally not. The police use this right now to record your location and time seen using license plates all over the nation - with private corporations providing the service.
and being in public doesn't automatically entail consent to being recorded.
And yes, it's called 'expectation to the right of privacy'. Public venues are not 'private' locations, and thus do not need consent. You can, quite literally, record anyone in public.
Even the link you provided agrees.
Doesn't Twitch own all data that is written and their TOS will state something like you can't store data yourself locally.
I'm not storing their data. I'm feeding it to an LLM which infers things and storing that data.
Was this system vibe coded? I get the feeling it was...
There's not actually that much code. It's like 8 lines for an AI 'agent', and maybe another 16 lines for 'tools', and I'm using Streamlink for grabbing the audio stream, and pulseaudio has a 'monitor' device you can use to listen to what's playing on the speakers. Throw it on a very minimal linux distro on a VM, and that's it.
I don't do 'vibe coding', but that IS where I got the idea from. People who are doing 'vibe coding' nowadays aren't just plugging things into a generic AI, they're spinning up 'agents' and making tools via MCP and then those agents are tasked with specific things, and use the tools to directly write to files, search the internet, read documents, etc
lol. Way to contradict yourself.
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Surely none of that uses a small LLM <= 3B?
Yes. The small LLM isn't retrieving data, it's just understanding context of text enough to know what "Facts" need to be written to a file. I'm using the publicly released Deepseek models from a couple of months ago.
Some questions and because you don't actually understand, also, the answers.
- what does the LLM understand the context of, (other user's data owned by Twitch)
- How is the LLM fed that data? (You store it and feed it to the LLM)
- Do you use Twitch's data and its users data through an AI without their consent? (Most likely, yes)
- Do you have consent from the users to store 'facts' about them (You're pissy, so obviously not)
- Are you then storing that processed data? (Yes, you are, written to a file)
- Is the purpose this data processing commercial (Yes, it is, designed to increase viewer count for the user of this system - and before you retort "OMG it helps twitch too"... Uhm no, Twitch has the viewers if not watching him, watching someone else)
I mean yeah, it's a use case, but own up to the fact that you're wrong. Or be pissy. I don't care.
So this wasn't a post actually asking what a small LLM was good for, it was just an opportunity you could use to dump on LLM usage I take it. So this whole thing was made in bad faith?
sounds like salesforce for a twitch setting. cool use case, must make fun moments when he mentions such things.
Esp. if the LLM just hallucinates 50% of the "facts" a about the users 👌
That hasn't been a problem at all for the 200+ users it's tracking so far for about 4 months.
I don't know a human that could ever keep up with this kind of thing. People just think he's super personable, but in reality he's not. He's just got a really cool tool to use.
He's managed some really good numbers because being that personal with people brings them back and keeps them chatting. He'll be pushing for partner after streaming for only a year and he's just some guy I found playing Wild Hearts with 0 viewers one day... :P
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