NVIDIA’s new AI chatbot runs locally on your PC

catculation@lemmy.zip to Technology@lemmy.world – 137 points – NVIDIA’s new AI chatbot runs locally on your PC
engadget.com

• NVIDIA released a demo version of a chatbot that runs locally on your PC, giving it access to your files and documents.

• The chatbot, called Chat with RTX, can answer queries and create summaries based on personal data fed into it.

• It supports various file formats and can integrate YouTube videos for contextual queries, making it useful for data research and analysis.

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That was an annoying read. It doesn't say what this actually is.

It's not a new LLM. Chat with RTX is specifically software to do inference (=use LLMs) at home, while using the hardware acceleration of RTX cards. There are several projects that do this, though they might not be quite as optimized for NVIDIA's hardware.

Go directly to NVIDIA to avoid the clickbait.

Chat with RTX uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM software and NVIDIA RTX acceleration to bring generative AI capabilities to local, GeForce-powered Windows PCs. Users can quickly, easily connect local files on a PC as a dataset to an open-source large language model like Mistral or Llama 2, enabling queries for quick, contextually relevant answers.

Source: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/chat-with-rtx-available-now/

Download page: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/ai-on-rtx/chat-with-rtx-generative-ai/

Pretty much every LLM you can download already has CUDA support via PyTorch.

However, some of the easier to use frontends don't use GPU acceleration because it's a bit of a pain to configure across a wide range of hardware models and driver versions. IIRC GPT4All does not use GPU acceleration yet (might need outdated; I haven't checked in a while).

If this makes local LLMs more accessible to people who are not familiar with setting up a CUDA development environment or Python venvs, that's great news.

Gpt4all somehow uses Gpu acceleration on my rx 6600xt

Ooh nice. Looking at the change logs, looks like they added Vulkan acceleration back in September. Probably not as good as CUDA/Metal on supported hardware though.

getting around 44 iterations/s (or whatever that means) on my gpu

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i have no need to talk to my gpu, i have a shrink for that

Idk I kinda like the idea of a madman living in my graphics card. I want to be able to spin them up and have them tell me lies that sound plausible and hallucinate things.

it gives the chatbot access to your files and documents

I'm sure nvidia will be trustworthy and responsible with this

They say it works without an internet connection, and if that’s true this could be pretty awesome. I’m always skeptical about interacting with chatbots that run in the cloud, but if I can put this behind a firewall so I know there’s no telemetry, I’m on board.

You can already do this. There are plenty of vids that show you how and it's pretty easy to get started. Expanding functionality to get it to act and respond how you want is a bit more challenging. But definitely doable.

The performance on my 3070 was awful, tools like LM Studio work significantly better.

Oh nooo, what an unfortunate turn of events. Guess that just means your GPU is too weak and old. How about upgrading to 40 series?

-- Nvidia, probably

On my 4090, the performance is much better than ChatGPT4. The output is way worse though.

Yeah my boss did a screen share with me and it was done instantly, while mine was needing to recompile the embeddings for the 5th time

I'm a bit of a noob here. Can someone please give me a few examples how I would use this on my local machine?