this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
112 points (95.2% liked)

Selfhosted

46654 readers
940 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I've tried coding and every one I've tried fails unless really, really basic small functions like what you learn as a newbie compared to say 4o mini that can spit out more sensible stuff that works.

I've tried explanations and they just regurgitate sentences that can be irrelevant, wrong, or get stuck in a loop.

So. what can I actually use a small LLM for? Which ones? I ask because I have an old laptop and the GPU can't really handle anything above 4B in a timely manner. 8B is about 1 t/s!

(page 2) 13 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] CrayonDevourer@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (22 children)

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.

[–] catty@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Surely none of that uses a small LLM <= 3B?

[–] CrayonDevourer@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

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.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Hadowenkiroast@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

sounds like salesforce for a twitch setting. cool use case, must make fun moments when he mentions such things.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (20 replies)
[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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?

absolutely nothing

[–] 30p87@feddit.org -3 points 1 day ago
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›