Technology

Use llama cpp. It uses cpu so you don't have to spend $10k just to get a graphics card that meets the minimum requirements. I run it on a shitty 3.0ghz Amd 8300 FX and it runs ok. Most people probably have better computers than that.

Note that gpt4all runs on top of llama cpp and despite gpt4all having a gui, it isn't any easier to use than llamacpp so you might as well use the one with less bloat. Just remember if something isn't working on llamacpp, it's also going to not work in exactly the same way on gpt4all.

Haven't compared it to much yet, I stopped toying with LLMs for a few months and a lot has changed. The new 4k contexts are a nice change though.

I don't know a specific guide, but try these steps

1. Go to https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui

2. Follow the 1 click installation instructions part way down and complete steps 1-3

3. When step 3 is done, if there were no errors, the web ui should be running. It should show the URL in the command window it opened. In my case it shows "https://127.0.0.1:7860". Input that into a web browser of your choice

4. Now you need to download a model as you don't actually have anything to run. For simplicity sake, I'd start with a small 7b model so you can quickly download it and try it out. Since I don't know your setup, I'll recommend using GGUF file formats which work with Llama.cpp which is able to load the model onto your CPU and GPU.

You can try this either of these models to start

https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Mistral-7B-v0.1-GGUF/blob/main/mistral-7b-v0.1.Q4_0.gguf (takes 22gig of system ram to load)

https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/vicuna-7B-v1.5-GGUF/blob/main/vicuna-7b-v1.5.Q4_K_M.gguf (takes 19gigs of system ram to load)

If you only have 16 gigs you can try something on those pages by going to /main and using a Q3 instead of a Q4 (quantization) but that's going to degrade the quality of the responses.

5. Once that is finished downloading, go to the folder you installed the web-ui at and there will be a folder called "models". Place the model you download into that folder.

6. In the web-ui you've launched in your browser, click on the "model" tab at the top. The top row of that page will indicate no model is loaded. Click the refresh icon beside that to refresh the model you just downloaded. Then select it in the drop down menu.

7. Click the "Load" button

8. If everything worked, and no errors are thrown (you'll see them in the command prompt window and possibly on the right side of the model tab) you're ready to go. Click on the "Chat" tab.

9. Enter something in the "send a message" to begin a conversation with your local AI!

Now that might not be using things efficiently, back on the model tab, there's "n-gpu-layers" which is how much to offload to the GPU. You can tweak the slider and see how much ram it says it's using in the command / terminal window and try to get it as close to your video cards ram as possible.

Then there's "threads" which is how many cores your CPU has (non virtual) and you can slide that up as well.

Once you've adjusted those, click the load button again, see that there's no errors and go back to the chat window. I'd only fuss with those once you have it working, so you know it's working.

Also, if something goes wrong after it's working, it should show the error in the command prompt window. So if it's suddenly hanging or something like that, check the window. It also posts interesting info like tokens per second, so I always keep an eye on it.

Oh, and TheBloke is a user who converts so many models into various formats for the community. He'll have a wide variety of gguf models available on HuggingFace, and if formats change over time, he's really good at updating them accordingly.

Good luck!