Do you host your own ML / AI / LLM? What do you use, and what do you use it for?
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Hell naw my homelab is already sucking way too much power and running too hot.
I do, but I am becoming increasingly more disappointed as time goes on. Not just self hosted, llms in general. They sometimes help, but they mislead so many times and waste time that you don’t even notice. I think that’s the trap. When you succeed at a task, you become impressed but don’t notice how many times it failed doing a simple task. And as soon as you scratch the surface, you see how you would have done it differently and perhaps in a better way. Even just googling is bad. It does research for you, but it has no critical thinking and can’t decide what is better from the results it gets (other than google ranking) so it often leads you to think it did as good as you would, when it’s nowhere near as good. Every time I did the googling myself after it did, I did it much better. And I mean MUCH better. Ask it to find the app, it misses the most important ones, hallucinates a bunch, for ex. I found this to be the case with frontier models as well.
Self hosting has its benefits, but seeing how the ecosystem looks right now, concluding this is a huge bubble is inevitable. It reminds me of crypto so much. It looks rich and plentiful, but as soon as you dig a mm under the surface - nobody has tested it, it’s got a critical bug, it is overblown and there are issues with no response. No docs, no info, no nothing. For the biggest thing in technology in history, it is awfully hollow. I don’t mean it in a condescending way, in fact community is enthusiastic and very helpful, it’s just that it doesn’t live up to what most would expect.
A caveat I need to mention is I have not used it for coding - I have an irrational fear and resistance towards it, being a programmer. I just won’t touch it, even if it means the end of my career. I’m trying to be grown-up about it, but so far, I dont want to use it, for good and bad reasons.
I was hosting LLM with LMStudio occasionally but can’t access it anymore due to some fuckery with CORS and http vs https in browsers.
I googled it, and it seems like you can just enable cors.
Yes you can enable cors in LMStudio. But since few months it’s blocked by all major web browsers if you aren’t using HTTPS.
Which I don’t. I had LMStudio server open to local network so I can use it on my phone or laptop via third party website.
Why would it be blocked? I can use http sites just fine, and even then you could setup a self-signed certificate.
I don’t know why. It worked half a year ago, now it doesn’t. All I know I can access server via local host on same machine, but if I try to access it over LAN it just doesn’t work no matter what I do. I might look into self signed cert but it feels like to much work for now.
No I don’t. Unforunetly using Claude (asking myself everyday why tf cuz I don’t do crazy shit) but trying to move on to LumoAI even meaby will buy a premium version to check this out formyself.
Running qwen3.6 27b through llama.cpp.
It’s about as capable as sonnet 3.5.
I use it for light scripting, but real coding is done by cloud models.
I’m also using it as the brain for my Hermes agent. It sends me digests of news, subreddits, chats that I’d like to read but don’t have time for. It does a great job researching things on the web for me, too.
That’s a great model and it’s the one I use too.
Do you mean Sonnet 4.5?
I don’t have the rig to run it at real speeds but I’ve played with it over API. Seems pretty good.
No, it needs a lot more babysitting than 4.5 does. 3.5 was on the same level of mistakes, at least on the quants I have to use.
If I wanted AI for some reason, it’d be self-host or nothing.
Running decencored Qwen3.6-27b and a 9b Gemma for RAG and scrapes on Ollama with a mostly vibe coded discord bot. Just got it to run tools and scrape and post news on a schedule. The first model I can run locally that’s smart enough to be useful. May give Jan a try for the back end after reading that other guys rant.
Mostly use it for stupid questions I could have googled and to brag to friends.
No. I still have no use for it and everything I use is automated without at a far lower footprint.
Yes, I got a Strix Halo machine before the RAM price hike and use it to run all my ML stuff on it.
Currently using llama-swap with llama.cpp/ComfyUI and opencode/Open WebUI as frontend.
I’m running Qwen3.6-27b, Voxtral Mini 4b, Piper and Qwen Image. Also, some embedding and reranking models.
I use them for:
- Tagging and classification of my documents in Paperless
- Home Assistant (voice assistant)
- Translations (both text and image)
- Transcriptions
- Some light coding and debugging
- Avatar/Backdrop generation for DnD sessions
What sort of tok/s are you getting on the strix?
About 200 t/s prompt processing and 10-20 t/s with MTP.
Greatly depends on the task, predictable things like code generates at 18-20 t/s. Creative writing more like 10-17 t/s.
Damn - I thought strix would do a bit better than that, for how much it costs.
Given the 27b is a dense model, I think the numbers are quite ok. Curious about the quant tho.
The cool thing about the strix is its large unified memory, but it lacks memory bandwith for compute intensive workloads. Something like Qwen3.5-122b MoE with only like 12b active parameters might run at twice the speed if it fits the configuration.
Curious about the quant tho.
Q8 from unsloth.
Something like Qwen3.5-122b
My go to model for knowledge. Definitely much faster at Q5 but it lacks the tool calling quality of the Qwen3.6 models. Really hoping we see a Qwen3.6-122b soon…
In case you missed the Ornith 1.0 release (Qwen and Gemma RL finetunes for agentic / coding workloads), they look interesting to bridge the gap until we see larger 3.6 models or a 3.7 release. I didn’t test them yet but according to benchmarks, the 35b MoE seems to be more or less on par with Qwen3.6 27b dense, while ofc a lot faster.
Yeah. Though I think theres a new strix out soon (Medusa? Gorgon? Something like that).
Its a bit like my P40. On paper, it has 24GB. But that 24gb is capped at 400GB/s and the ai compute is what…Pascal era?
AI = Good, fast, cheap - pick 2
Well compared to the strix, 400GB/s is not that bad, I think with fast system RAM and expert offloading you could squeeze quite something out of it when running stuff in the 100b-a10b regions.
Your bigger problem is going to be future software support.
I currently run Qwen3.6-27b on llama.cpp and use it via openwebui. Mostly, I use it for web research via tavily, to a lesser extent for coding and interactively learning about things that are new to me but common in training data (such as basic math or ML concepts).
An aside for anyone reading this:
https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/
And that barely scratches the surface. Please.
Use anything but Ollama. Even APIs.
thank you
Didn’t know this. Going to switch this weekend, thanks for sharing this!
Thanks for this link. Because of this article, I had claude stand up a llama.cpp container next to my already running ollama container. It ran side by side tests with the same model and parameters, and the results blew ollama out of the water. I’m in the process of moving hermes and openwebgui over to the llama.cpp instance to see how it goes day to day.
If you’re using docker anyway, and “fast” pure GPU models, you might try a vllm container while you’re at it.
It should be much faster than even llama.cpp, albeit at the cost of context length, and it supports some exotic 4-bit quantization like SPQA.
Same with TabbyAPI. It’s quantization is SOTA, though it does not support CPU offloading, and it’s speed is somewhere between vllm and llama.cpp.
Thanks! I’ll look into this. I’m a bit limited at 12GB of VRAM right now.
A 3060?
Exllama/TabbyAPI is still worth looking at if you are trying to run a model purely in GPU RAM. It’s easily the most VRAM efficient backend, it just doesn’t support CPU offloading (which is useful for MoEs if you have considerable spare CPU RAM) and more optimized for 4xxx and up Nvidia cards.
And TabbyAPI has a docker container you can use. Look for “exl3” models on huggingface.
Llama.cpp or death!
It’s not that hard to use
llama.cppdirectly anyway. Why would I use a wrapper when I can just run a python script?I use LMStudio, because it has quality of life improvements like nice GUI and huggingface search engine. Also they have Vulkan backend that at least on 7900XTX is ~10% faster than rocm (on LLama 3 8b Q4_0 it gets 115Tokens/s vs 105 on rocm)
Or exllama! Vllm, sglang, Lorax. Koboldcpp, Aphrodite, text-generation-webui, LM Studio, powerinfer, ktransformers, mlc-LLM, really whatever floats your boat. Just not ollama, specifically.
I agree that the concerns listed there are smells, and I wasn’t aware of some of the options listed there.
Thank you for sharing this!
looks like extreme nitpicking without any real issues beyond some VC funding a FOSS issues.
//whyre you spamming the comment to everyone? its quite alarmist actually
I completely disagree.
Frankly, I find the description “VC funding a FOSS” offensive. They aren’t funding the engine. I’ve been messing with LLM inference engines since 2022, and Ollama is the worst I’ve seen in the community.
They misname models for SEO. They leech off llama.cpp while deliberately hiding attribution yet redirecting GH support requests there. They sometimes make their own GGUFs+forked releases which are broken and incompatibile with upstream llama.cpp, just so they can get a release out a day ahead for hype, even though it doesn’t really work and they’ll never upstream one line. They set a default context size thats basically unusable, they screw up chat templates and deep internal code with no obvious indicators, they release suboptimal quants without iMatrix, they gate you into their internal quantization repo and model card format, they hide model downloads on your hard drive, they mess with standard APIs for no good reason other than to mess up other backends. I could go on and on.
And if that’s all fine, they’re enshittifying the app with closed code, and pointers to cloud models.
They GIVE LLM inference a bad name, by making it a terrible quality engine that happens to show up in search as the “default.” Hence the comments below of people being unimpressed with local inference. And they sap attention from actual llama.cpp devs, without contributing a single dime. Everyone in the localllama communtity hates their guts, and that’s not even getting into the interpersonal drama they’ve stirred.
They are a leech that’s a net drag to the whole community, that we can’t get rid of because they’re attention grifters. And they’ve gotten worse and worse over time.
It’s more morale to use any cloud API over Ollama, in my eyes. They’re a grift.
EDIT: And, to be clear, I’m not against VC funded downstream stuff.
LM Studio is good! Even though it’s closed source.
Tons of downstream projects are great.
Yes, llama-swap and I use it for home assistant text-gen notifications, basic coding tasks, etc
If anyone here self-hosts definitely check out llama-swap as it has some nifty features for hotswapping LLMs, image generation models and voice models.
Partially. I started with hosting my own llama3.2 + granite4 models using Ollama for my Home Assistant smart home and for general chat with OpenWebUI. I also run whisper for speech-to-text locally on my 1080 Ti GPU. I like the privacy and ownership of my self-hosted models, but I started to run into limitations with the small weights. So I built some tools that allow me to selectively route traffic to larger models hosted on DeepInfra depending on my need. For example, to GLM/Kimi models for code reviews or for my custom harnesses or harder problems.
Yes. My Actual Intelligence lives in my head, and runs mostly on coffee.
Just coffee?!? That’s cool.
Mine runs on:
- coffee
- spite
- tortilla chips
- & shame
Mostly on coffee, not exclusively. Noticable amounts of spite & tortilla chips are also present, yes, but… no shame.
I replace tortilla by “raclette” but that cultural.
Nice!
If that’s not already on a shirt it should be
Do you get many hallucinations?
Only when I’m deprived of coffee.
Would flowers work instead?
No. I’m not dead yet.
I’ll make sure to send you flowers, Algernon lol
@SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone this comment is not (directly) for you, I just want it in context.
Before you report someone for breaking rule 1, please look a the context. Specifically, the username someone may be replying to.
LOL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon
Looks like someone got big mad over a harmless, good natured and on topic joke. You love to see it.
Sorry they wasted your time.
Eh, its fine. Certainly better than the “I don’t like this so I’m going to report it” approach.
critical security bug: if coffee is taken away my head hurts :(
That doesn’t sound artificial.
With sufficient coffee, mine shows considerable artifice.
Plastic flowers.
As we know AI stands for “An Indian”, so if you’re not from India, its actually impossible to self host.
Well, unless you manage to trap one in your basement, but that would violate human rights and hopefully also break the laws of your country.
You may be confusing Indians with gremlins (AGI). Which might explain ChatGPTs obsession with gremlins
I host my own AI, mostly for testing and because I wanted something that was mine and mine alone. I use Ollama and run models like Llama, Mistral, and Qwen. I honestly don’t use it much, but I wanted to have my own setup just in case online services go down or become less available. It’s part of my whole “own everything I use” mantra that I’ve been on lately.
