this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
157 points (93.4% liked)

Technology

60026 readers
3582 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s
[email protected]
[email protected]
L4s
enu
157
NVIDIA’s new AI chatbot runs locally on your PC (www.engadget.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology
35 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

• NVIDIA released a demo version of a chatbot that runs locally on your PC, giving it access to your files and documents.

• The chatbot, called Chat with RTX, can answer queries and create summaries based on personal data fed into it.

• It supports various file formats and can integrate YouTube videos for contextual queries, making it useful for data research and analysis.

all 36 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] General_Effort 51 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That was an annoying read. It doesn't say what this actually is.

It's not a new LLM. Chat with RTX is specifically software to do inference (=use LLMs) at home, while using the hardware acceleration of RTX cards. There are several projects that do this, though they might not be quite as optimized for NVIDIA's hardware.

Go directly to NVIDIA to avoid the clickbait.

Chat with RTX uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM software and NVIDIA RTX acceleration to bring generative AI capabilities to local, GeForce-powered Windows PCs. Users can quickly, easily connect local files on a PC as a dataset to an open-source large language model like Mistral or Llama 2, enabling queries for quick, contextually relevant answers.

Source: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/chat-with-rtx-available-now/

Download page: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/ai-on-rtx/chat-with-rtx-generative-ai/

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Pretty much every LLM you can download already has CUDA support via PyTorch.

However, some of the easier to use frontends don't use GPU acceleration because it's a bit of a pain to configure across a wide range of hardware models and driver versions. IIRC GPT4All does not use GPU acceleration yet (might need outdated; I haven't checked in a while).

If this makes local LLMs more accessible to people who are not familiar with setting up a CUDA development environment or Python venvs, that's great news.

[–] General_Effort 5 points 10 months ago

I'd hope that this uses the hardware better than Pytorch. Otherwise, why the specific hardware demands? Well, it can always be marketing.

There are several alternatives that offer 1-click installers. EG in this thread:

AGPL-3.0 license: https://jan.ai/

MIT license: https://ollama.com/

MIT license: https://gpt4all.io/index.html

(There's more.)

[–] CeeBee 2 points 10 months ago

Ollama with Ollama WebUI is the best combo from my experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Gpt4all somehow uses Gpu acceleration on my rx 6600xt

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Ooh nice. Looking at the change logs, looks like they added Vulkan acceleration back in September. Probably not as good as CUDA/Metal on supported hardware though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

getting around 44 iterations/s (or whatever that means) on my gpu

[–] [email protected] 41 points 10 months ago (3 children)

i have no need to talk to my gpu, i have a shrink for that

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago

Idk I kinda like the idea of a madman living in my graphics card. I want to be able to spin them up and have them tell me lies that sound plausible and hallucinate things.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Gpu is cheaper (somehow)

[–] gaifux 1 points 10 months ago

Your shrink renders video frames?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

it gives the chatbot access to your files and documents

I'm sure nvidia will be trustworthy and responsible with this

[–] BertramDitore 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They say it works without an internet connection, and if that’s true this could be pretty awesome. I’m always skeptical about interacting with chatbots that run in the cloud, but if I can put this behind a firewall so I know there’s no telemetry, I’m on board.

[–] halfwaythere 8 points 10 months ago

You can already do this. There are plenty of vids that show you how and it's pretty easy to get started. Expanding functionality to get it to act and respond how you want is a bit more challenging. But definitely doable.

[–] Coldgoron 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I recommend jan.ai over this, last I heard it mentioned it was a decent option.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

I use https://huggingface.co/chat , you can also easily host open source models on your local machine

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There's also GPT4All that I'm aware of.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Or ollama.ai

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The performance on my 3070 was awful, tools like LM Studio work significantly better.

[–] TheGrandNagus 19 points 10 months ago

Oh nooo, what an unfortunate turn of events. Guess that just means your GPU is too weak and old. How about upgrading to 40 series?

-- Nvidia, probably

[–] anlumo 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

On my 4090, the performance is much better than ChatGPT4. The output is way worse though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Yeah my boss did a screen share with me and it was done instantly, while mine was needing to recompile the embeddings for the 5th time

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Shame they leave GTX owners out in the cold again.

[–] Kyrgizion 4 points 10 months ago

2xxx too. It's only available for 3xxx and up.

[–] anlumo 2 points 10 months ago

The whole point of the project was to use the Tensor cores. There are a ton of other implementations for regular GPU acceleration.

[–] CeeBee 2 points 10 months ago

Just use Ollama with Ollama WebUI

[–] militaryintelligence 2 points 10 months ago

AI is a data harvesting free-for-all

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Can I sing the NVIDIA song with it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

NVIDIA song

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I had almost forgotten that existed

Thanks

[–] ElHijoDelPilote 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I'm a bit of a noob here. Can someone please give me a few examples how I would use this on my local machine?