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.



I don’t want to create an extra post, so I ask here.
Where do you guys get your hardware from, for an affordable price?
I’d like to run at least a 27b model but my hardware is too weak. I’m on a 16GB unified mem, M4. Tried running Bonsai 27b (it’s Qwen architecture) but I had to close all other apps and it is not in a state that I could work with it.
A Tesla V100 is fairly affordable but older and won’t run newer quants like FP8 or attention kernel routines. But it will run a pile of models, even most new models are compatible or usable.
I will ask Santa Claus for that GPU <3