I am a teacher and I have a LOT of different literature material that I wish to study, and play around with.
I wish to have a self-hosted and reasonably smart LLM into which I can feed all the textual material I have generated over the years. I would be interested to see if this model can answer some of my subjective course questions that I have set over my exams, or write small paragraphs about the topic I teach.
In terms of hardware, I have an old Lenovo laptop with an NVIDIA graphics card.
P.S: I am not technically very experienced. I run Linux and can do very basic stuff. Never self hosted anything other than LibreTranslate and a pihole!
Can they not get a TPU on USB, like the Coral Accelerator or something?
It’s less the calculations and more about memory bandwidth. To generate a token you need to go through all the model data, and that’s usually many many gigabytes. So the time it takes to read through in memory is usually longer than the compute time. GPUs have gb’s of RAM that’s many times faster than the CPU’s ram, which is the main reason it’s faster for llm’s.
Most tpu’s don’t have much ram, and especially cheap ones.