Do you use it to help with schoolwork / work? Maybe to help you code projects, or to help teach you how to do something?
What are your preferred models and why?
I employ this technique to embellish my email communications, thereby enhancing their perceived authenticity and relatability. Admittedly, I am not particularly adept at articulating my thoughts in comprehensive, well-structured sentences. I tend to favor a more primal, straightforward cognitive style—what one might colloquially refer to as a “meat-and-potatoes” or “caveman” approach to thinking. Ha.
Mostly to help quickly pull together and summarize / organize information from web searches done via Open WebUI
Also to edit copy or brainstorm ideas for messaging and scripts etc
Sometimes to have discussions around complex topics to ensure I understand them.
Favorite model to run locally now is easily Qwen3-30B-A3B. It can do reasoning or more quick response stuff and runs very well on my 24 GB of VRAM RTX 3090. Plus, because it has a MoE architecture with only 3B parameters active when doing inference its lightning fast.
have you tried LM Studio as an interface? I havent tried open webui yet, just lm studio and text-generation-webui, so I am not sure if I’m limiting myself by using LM studio so much (I am very much a novice to the tech and do not work in computer science, so I’m trying to balance ease of use with customization)
It sounds like we’re on similar levels of technical proficiency. I have learned a lot by reading and going down wormholes on how LLMs work and how to troubleshoot and even optimize them to an extent but I’m not a computer engineer or programmer for sure.
I started with LM studio before Ollama/Open WebUI and it does have some good features and an overall decent UI. I switched because OWUI seems to have more extensibility with tools and functions etc and I wanted something I could run as a server and use on my phone and laptop elsewhere etc. OWUI has been great for that although setting up remote access for the server on the web did take a lot of trial and error. The OWUI team also develops and updates the software very quickly so that’s great.
I’m not familiar with text-generation-WebUI but at this point I’m not really wanting for much more out of a setup than my docker stack with Ollama and OWUI
Thanks for the excellent response! I’m going to give openwebui a try and do some of that trial and error as well - best way to learn!
I currently don’t. But I am ollama-curious. I would like to feed it a bunch of technical manuals and then be able to ask it to recite specs or procedures (with optional links to it’s source info for sanity checking). Is this where I need to be looking/learning?
you might want to look into RAG and ‘long-term memory’ concepts. I’ve been playing around with creating a self-hosted LLM that has long-term memory (using pre-trained models), which is essentially the same thing as you’re describing. Also - GPU matters. I’m using an RTX 4070 and it’s noticeably slower than something like in-browser chatgpt, but I know 4070 is kinda pricey so many home users might have earlier/slower gpu’s.
How have you been making those models? I have a 4070 and doing it locally has been a dependency hellscape, I’ve been tempted to rent cloud GPU time just to save the hassle.
How have you been making those models? I have a 4070 and doing it locally has been a dependency hellscape, I’ve been tempted to rent cloud GPU time just to save the hassle.