Is hammer ai the best option for running local ai models on a laptop?

E

Ernest

New member
I'm looking for some way of using AI chat without sending all my data up to some server in the cloud, and hammer ai seems like a sure winner as you have it running local in the browser. My main concern is the hardware performance, I'm using a standard 16GB RAM laptop, and my concerns were that using LLMs in the local run on the machine would cause a huge lag or overheat the system. Has someone here tried his or her roleplay or productivity templates? I'm also curious to know if it supports the importing custom models from who-knows-where like Hugging Face or if you're critiqued to the ones created into the software itself. Any advice on achieving the highest response times would be huge some help!
 
I used Hammer AI on an equivalent of 16GB setup a few weeks. It is certainly one of the simplest to get started with as WebGPU is used so that it can run in the browser. To keep the performance low, you will be devoting to smaller models such as Llama 3 8B or Phi-3. It will not heat up your laptop in a harmful manner, but your fans will surely start going on during lengthy generations. As far as custom models are concerned, the desktop version physically talks to Ollama, and you can pull practically anything off Hugging Face provided you have the GGUF file.
 
Oh yes, 16GB of RAM is so large... as long as you love to see your laptop struggling to act like a jet engine whilst it comes up with three words an hour. Attempting to use local AI, by means of a browser-based wrapper, is like attempting to pull a boat using a bicycle. It works, but perhaps do not be surprised when the chain breaks.
 
Hardware wise, your greatest bottleneck will be not the 16GB RAM, but your VRAM. Without a dedicated GPU, the workload of Hammer AI will be transferred to the system RAM, which is much slower. You want to make sure that you are quantizing models 4-bit to maximize response times. This decreases memory foot print and an increment in the number of tokens per second. Also, make sure your context window is below 4096 tokens to avoid the so-called lag that you are concerned about as you continue to expand the chat history.
 
The templates of productivity are fantastic until the moment when you notice that you have wasted four hours on the character card tweaking to play some business meeting roleplay rather than working on your tasks. It has become so hot playing with local models on my laptop that I now use it as a second heater in my cup of coffee. 10/10 in terms of warmth, 2/10 in terms of battery life.
 
Is it local as long as it is running in Chrome? I tend to be skeptical of web-based solutions. In case privacy is your primary objective, you should use a dedicated desktop-based application, such as LM Studio or AnythingLLM. They provide you with much greater control over the location of the data and the use of the hardware than a browser cache which can be cleared by mistake.
 
Oh, I adore the roleplay templates! The community characters are of the best kind. In case you are in a hurry, then by all means get the Hammer AI desktop application and not simply use the online version. It has an easy connection to Ollama, and thus you could literally go to Hugging Face, use one of the GGUF models that you liked, and import it on the command line. It is a complete privacy revolution!
 
I was also concerned with the same issue: my laptop overheating! Frankly speaking, you will be alright as long as you are not covering the vents. The system will slow down itself before actual damage occurs. I have the productivity templates to write emails and the lag is hardly felt on smaller models. First just close your 50 open Chrome tabs!
 
To be honest, Hammer AI is not a bad choice, especially when trying it as a beginner, but it is hardly the best. You want to be concerned with the performance and response times, then you should be considering KoboldCPP or even plain Llama.cpp. On top of the fact that you simply do not need an overhead, browser-based LLMs introduce one, which is unnecessary in a 16GB-limited environment.
 
It is interesting how we have come out of the giant server farms to the personal computer. It is a matter of taste as to whether Hammer is the best, but here the real victory goes to the ability to run a billion-parameter brain in a browser tab on a mid-range laptop. It is concerning restoring your digital sovereignty, one local token at a time.
 
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