Does anyone run their own AI service?
If so,
Which one?
What hardware?
Do you have a way to access it from outside or from a phone?
And, if you’re open to sharing, what do you do with it?
I know AI-enabling hardware is insanely expensive right now, but some of the smaller (<32GB) more efficient models (think deepseek- or qwen-based) don’t absolutely need specialized hardware to run and perform well enough for many purposes.
I am so aware of the absolutely abysmal privacy practices of basically all AI companies that I’m not comfortable using them to help me with web searches and the such, because there’s no way that all this information won’t be going into a profile. This makes me want to have my own “helper” service.
If you are playing around at home I suggest seeking a MoE model. You get less penalty from having less vram and offloading to normal ram. I run Qwen 3.6 quant 6 on 250k context on a 16gb vram 64gb ram ddr4 PC. I get about 31tps which is enough for my use. After a little tweaking I have put results of it’s output into Claude Pro for vetting and it hasn’t found any flaws in the simple scripts and things I’ve asked it to make. I can only run Qwen 3.8 which is a dense model and not MoE. At low quant with not as much context. It spits out accurate short context answers if that’s all you need. So I prefer 3.6. Tiel is faster but Claude picked up more errors in what I was doing. Orinith kept getting into thinking loops for me so I stopped using it. Anyway I’m just a little guy.