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.
Your use cases are quite similar to what I’ve been trying to action.
One question I keep wondering about is the “security” aspect of it. And how the inputs to the model might work. Yes it can read your calendar and you could “Jeeves, please remind me to hang out with Wooster next week” but it’s easy to forget and I have a hard time logging spontaneous events.
Any ideas on how you imagine the friend/activity tracker could work?
Was thinking maybe it could read my smartwatch location history. Or scan the photos I take. But that gets dystopian fast (yes it’ll be local but then I’m worried about security).
Fun to ponder!
I think having a chat interface is part of it so it’s friendly and convenient to use. I think someone suggested a matrix bot and that would continue the theme of privacy. You could have different channels or groups for different personas. Maybe one is your Majordomo, another is a simpler calendar bot, another is for journaling, etc.
Then, wire in some cron jobs to invoke the AI to prompt you on various subjects. “Anything you want to share?” every day at 9pm. If you miss a day or two because you were busy or asleep, you can catch it up later or not at all. You could even have it ask what you did at work if your life is like mine and they kinda blend together and you don’t know how many hours you worked.
Come to think of it you could use it as a note taker. It could separate work notes from personal notes.