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.
I used Cline as my VSCode chat plugin for models in LMStudio. Worked pretty well but I have moved my local LLM stack to Hermes in the meantime.
I tried using zoo with qwen3.6 and 2.5 but it failed horrendously. My card could only handle like a 16k context window with those models, and the prompt alone was like 11k.
Tried opencode and that was fast…but can’t get it to interact with system yet. More playing to do.