Technology

I haven’t used it and only heard about it while writing this post, but Open WebUI looks really promising. I’m going to check it out the next time I mess with my home server’s AI apps. If you want more options, read on.

Disclaimer: I’ve looked into most of the options below enough to feel comfortable recommending them, but I’ve only personally self hosted the Automatic 1111 webui, the Oobabooga webui, and Kobold.cpp.

If you want just an LLM and an image generator, then:

For the image generator, something that leverages Stable Diffusion models:

• Automatic1111
• InvokeAI
• ComfyUI

And then find models that you like at Civitai.

For the LLM, the best option depends on your hardware. Not knowing anything about your hardware, I recommend a llama.cpp based solution. Check out one of these:

• Oobabooga webui
• Ollama
• Jan
• LMStudio
• Kobold.cpp

Alternatively, VLLM is allegedly the fastest for multi-user CPU-based inference, though as far as I can tell it doesn’t have its own webui (but it does expose OpenAI compatible API endpoints).

And then find a model you like at Huggingface. I recommend finding a model quantized by TheBloke.

There are a couple communities not on Lemmy that discuss local LLMs - r/LocalLLaMA and r/LocalLLM for example - so if you’re trying to figure out which model to try, that’s a good place to check.

If you want a multimodal AI, you can use llama.cpp with a model like LLAVA. The options below also have multimodal support.

If you want an AI assistant with expanded capabilities - like searching your documents or the web (RAG), etc. - then I don’t have a ton of experience there, but these seem to do that job:

• H2OGPT
• Open WebUI, formerly Ollama Webui

If you want to use your local model as more than just a chat bot - integrating it into your IDE or a browser extension - then there are options there, and as far as I know every LLM above can be configured to expose an API allowing it to be used by your other tools. Some, like Open WebUI, expose OpenAI compatible APIs and so can be used with tools built to be used with OpenAI. I don't know of many tools like this, though - I was surprisingly not able to find a browser extension that could use your own API, for example. Here are a couple examples:

• Continue for VS Code / JetBrains IDEs
• "ChatGPT Utilities" for A1111 WebUI - this doesn't let you set the URL by default, but since it's open source you could modify it pretty easily

Also, I found this Medium article listed some of the things I described above as well as several others that I’d never heard of.