LocalLLaMA

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Community to discuss about Llama, the family of large language models created by Meta AI.

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Cheapest way to run local LLMs? (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by ClassroomGold6910@alien.top to c/localllama@poweruser.forum

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Not super knowledgeable about all the different specs of the different Orange PI and Rasberry PI models. I'm looking for something relatively cheap that can connect to WiFi and USB. I want to be able to run at least 13b models at a a decent tok / s.

Also open to other solutions. I have a Mac M1 (8gb RAM) and upgrading the computer itself would be cost prohibitive for me.

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[–] testuser514@alien.top 1 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Any suggestions on this?

[–] ButlerFish@alien.top 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

What I do is, sign up to run pod and buy $10 of credit, then go to the "templates" section and use it to make a cloud VM pre-loaded with the software to run LLMs. One of their 'official' templates called " RunPod TheBloke LLMs" should be good. I usually use the A100 pod type, but you can get bigger or smaller / faster or cheaper.

Depending on the Readme for the template you can click Connect to Jupyter and run the notebook that came with the template to start services, download your model from huggingface or whatever. This is fine for experimenting with LLMs.

If what you had planned was some kind of home project like building your own home assistant then you have a bunch of other problems to solve like how to do that cheaply, trigger words and TTS/STT. You might use the serverless or spot instance functionality Runpod has and figure out the smallest pod / LLM that works for your use. You'd probably do the microphone and triggerword stuff on your Pi and have it connect to the runpod server to run the TTS/STT and LLM bits.

[–] herozorro@alien.top 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Remember when you finish for the day that if you don't delete the pod (and any storage you created) your credit balance will reduce while you are sleeping. But at least it can't go negative and send you a big bill like evil AWS.

do they charge per hour like a parking meter or only when the pod is used

[–] ButlerFish@alien.top 1 points 9 months ago

You get charged while to pod is running, and the pod is running until you turn it off on the runpod control panel even if you aren't actually doing anything on there right now.

If you added a volume (cloud hard drive) when you created it then, even when it is turned off, you are paying 10 cents / gigabyte / month to rent that hard drive so your data is still there when you turn it on again.

For niche usecases where it needs to be available but isn't running stuff most of the time like that home assistant I mentioned, look at runpod serverless which is much more fiddly and hard to use but will let you pay essentially per prompt... for playing with LLMs and interacting it's much better to just rent a server and turn it off when you are done.