I am a teacher and I have a LOT of different literature material that I wish to study, and play around with.
I wish to have a self-hosted and reasonably smart LLM into which I can feed all the textual material I have generated over the years. I would be interested to see if this model can answer some of my subjective course questions that I have set over my exams, or write small paragraphs about the topic I teach.
In terms of hardware, I have an old Lenovo laptop with an NVIDIA graphics card.
P.S: I am not technically very experienced. I run Linux and can do very basic stuff. Never self hosted anything other than LibreTranslate and a pihole!
While you can run an llm on an “old” laptop with an Nvidia GC it will likely be really slow. Like several minutes to much much longer slow. Huggingface.co is a good place to start and has a ton of different LLMs to choose from that range from small enough to run on your hardware to ones that won’t.
As you are a teacher you know that research is going to be vital to your understanding and implementing this project. There is a plethora of information out there. There will not be a single person’s answer that will work perfectly for your wants and your hardware.
When you have figured out your plan and then run into issues that’s a good point to ask questions with more information about your situation.
I say this cause I just went through this. Not to be an ass.
Probably better to ask on [email protected]. Ollama should be able to give you a decent LLM, and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) will let it reference your dataset.
The only issue is that you asked for a smart model, which usually means a larger one, plus the RAG portion consumes even more memory, which may be more than a typical laptop can handle. Smaller models have a higher tendency to hallucinate - produce incorrect answers.
Short answer - yes, you can do it. It’s just a matter of how much RAM you have available and how long you’re willing to wait for an answer.
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