LocalLLaMA

So you are soon gunna realize that unfortunately your pc is not as cutting edge as you think. Your main need is vram. For the 4070 ti you only have 12 gigs of vram. So you will be limited to 7b and 13b models. You can load into ram though but your speeds plummet. Mistal 7b is a good option to start with.

Go buy two rtx3090, your mid tier gpu only has 12GB vram, I see your passion, but do some research, you need more VRAM.

The guide I just wrote should be helpful to you,

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/185ce1l/my_settings_for_optimal_7b_roleplay_some_general/

first off, why is your title formatted like an article? you mention being a student, so do you imply you want resources for studying the underlying architecture on the large language models? in which case you could watch the channel of "Andej Karpathy" which was pretty enlightening to a layman like me, but it's pretty hard to progress further than that on the 'science' of llms without a cs degree.

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other than that, there really isn't a 'study' to be done of llms, as it's a pretty new field, unless you want to get into hardcore ml stuff with a cs degree and all, as for models, with your not quite 'cutting edge' pc, you could try a yi 34b finetune for longer context , though it's prone to break from my testing, or you could try many smaller 7b models, of which i have been enjoying the whole family of mistral finetunes the most (openorca, openhermes, etc).

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for roleplay and stuff the LLaMa Tiefighter model is pretty cool. if you truly want access to cutting edge hardware that will be capable of running the best open source models. eg llama 70b or goliath 120b, you could look into paid cloud gpu services like runpod which are pretty easy to use and i had a mostly positive experience running llms there. hope this answer helps.