I have avoided AI (LLMS) because it didn’t seem nearly useful enough to warrant supporting these tech assholes. Is there anyway to use it locally on a normal device (16 Gb ram, 8 year old Geforce graphics, etc?). Can I just slow it down and get it to work locally?
Totally: You can run stuff on an even worse specced potato computer! It’ll just be slower, possibly to the point where you don’t really find it to be worth it, but you could still run local models. You won’t really be slowing it down, it’ll be the hardware limitations, but there are plenty of models that can work. There are specific model suggestions in the other comments but maybe give folks some more info on what exactly you want to do and you might get some more useful info.
Maybe write some scripts for task automation, I am not really sure. As I said I haven’t really used it before and don’t really buy into how awesome it is. So I just kind of want to play around with it, without giving all my data away or spending money to upgrade my computer for something I likely won’t use often or at all after testing it out.
I’d put it like this: If you already know what you’re doing code-wise, “AI” (read: LLMs) can potentially be helpful but you should vet absolutely everything it does and assume (probably correctly) that it has fucked up in some way.
If you do not know how to code, it’s probably not a great idea to trust it with anything important, but if you’re just doing it as a learning experience, that’s OK. Just don’t fall into the trap of letting it think for you: It is not a replacement for learning how to write code.
It’s something that has been wildly oversold in certain ways because the people running it have a financial incentive to hype it up, but used correctly and with caution, it can be potentially useful in the hands of someone who already knows what they’re doing.
Yeah it would be 100% for fun and or learning. Coding is not my profession, and I have imposter syndrome in my actual profession… Lol. I certainly wouldn’t trust any code I or an LLM wrote to provide it to someone else or contribute to anything.