Self-Hosted AI is pretty darn cool
I don't consider myself very technical. I've never taken a computer science course and don't know python. I've learned some things like Linux, the command line, docker and networking/pfSense because I value my privacy. My point is that anyone can do this, even if you aren't technical.
I tried both LM Studio and Ollama. I prefer Ollama. Then you download models and use them to have your own private, personal GPT. I access it both on my local machine through the command line but I also installed Open WebUI in a docker container so I can access it on any device on my local network (I don't expose services to the internet).
Having a private ai/gpt is pretty cool. You can download and test new models. And it is private. Yes, there are ethical concerns about how the model got the training. I'm not minimizing those concerns. But if you want your own AI/GPT assistant, give it a try. I set it up in a couple of hours, and as I said... I'm not even that technical.
Thank you for this. I consider myself technical and those words felt like a punch in the gut.
I'm sorry if I offended. I can't code or understand existing code and have always felt that technical people code. I guess I should expand my definition. Again, sorry that my words felt like a punch in the gut... wasn't my intention at all.
I've been in my field for 21 years. I make really good money, and have high confidence in my hard-earned skillset. I focus on Cloud Infrastructure and general Linux administration, but I code in a handful of languages to facilitate automation (because I'm lazy). I consider myself extremely well versed in technology in general.
... Then I watch a YouTube video where some guy hand-solders a motherboard for his custom-designed keyboard, and decides it's easier to - instead of adapt someone else's - write his own driver from scratch, then open-sources everything from the PCB, to the CAD files he used to print the case, to the driver itself. Then he uploads the video, titled "Quick weekend project because I couldn't find the keyboard layout I wanted on Amazon", and forgets about the whole thing.
In that moment, I feel like a complete, no-nothing idiot.
A person with a doctorate in astrophysics isn't not-a-doctor because they don't know how to do brain surgery. Hell, a doctor who is a surgeon isn't not-those-things because he isn't - specifically - a brain surgeon.
Don't sell yourself short because other people do things you don't (yet, or even ever). You're a technical person.
It depends heavily on what you do and what you're comparing yourself against. I've been making a living with IT for nearly 20 years and I still don't consider myself to be an expert on anything, but it's a really wide field and what I've learned that the things I consider 'easy' or 'simple' (mostly with linux servers) are surprisingly difficult for people who'd (for example) wipe the floor with me if we competed on planning and setting up an server infrastructure or build enterprise networks.
And of course I've also met the other end of spectrum. People who claim to be 'experts' or 'senior techs' at something are so incompetent on their tasks or their field of knowledge is so ridiculously narrow that I wouldn't trust them with anything above first tier helpdesk if even that. And the sad part is that those 'experts' often make way more money than me because they happened to score a job on some big IT company and their hours are billed accordingly.
And then there's the whole other can of worms on a forums like this where 'technical people' range from someone who can install a operating system by following instructions to the guys who write assembly code to some obscure old hardware just for the fun of it.