Sweden right now -

You can absolutely self host LLMs. HELM team has done an excellent job benchmarking the efficiency of different models for specific tasks so that would be a good place to start. You can balance model performance for your specific task with the model’s efficiency - in most situations, larger models are better performing but use more GPUs or are only available via APIs.

There are currently 3 different approaches to use AI for a custom task and application -

1. Train a base LLM from scratch - this is like creating your own GPT-by_autopilot model. This would be the maximum level of control, however the amount of compute, time, and data required for training does not make this an ideal approach for the end user. There are many open source base LLMs already published on HuggingFace that can be used instead.

2. Fine-tune a base LLM - starting with a base LLM, it can be fine tuned for a certain set of tasks. For example, you can fine tune a model to follow instructions or use as a chatbot. InstructGPT and GPT3.5+ are examples of fine tuned models. This approach allows you to create a model that can understand a specific domain or a set of instructions particularly well as compared to the base LLM. However, any time that training a large model is needed, it will be an expensive approach. If you are starting out, I’ll suggest exploring this as a v2 step for improving your model.

3. Prompt engineering or indexing using an existing LLM - starting with an existing model, create prompts to achieve your objective. This approach gives you the least control over the model itself, but is the most efficient. I would suggest this as the first approach to try. Langchain is the most widely used tool for prompt engineering and supports using self hosted base- or instruct-LLM. If your task is search and retrieval, an embeddings model is used. In this scenario, you generate embeddings for all your content and store the embeddings as vectors. For a user query, you then convert it to an embedding using the same model, and finally retrieve the most similar content based on vector similarity. Langchain provides this capability, but IMO, sentence-transformers may be a better starting point for a self hosted retrieval application. Without any intention to hijack this post, you can check out my project - synology-photos-nlp-search - as an example of a self hosted retrieval application.

To learn more, I have found the recent deeplearning.ai short courses to be quite good - they are short, comprehensive, and free.

Eating at a deficit makes trying to gain muscle a slow process. If you would like to gain muscle faster, your strategy of going surplus seems right. Keep at it, you are doing the right things and it will show eventually! Additionally, here’s some broad suggestions in case some resonate with you and others.

Diets and regimens work differently for different people. So I would preface everything by - what works for me or someone else may not work for you and you’ll need to do some trial and error to figure out what would work the best for you.

I read somewhere that you count calories to manage weight and exercise to get into/maintain shape. So that’s my TL;DR.

• Weight - Weight will always be determined by calories in, calories out. Your metabolism, macronutrients intake, sleep behavior, activity level, genetics, mental health will all impact how much calories your body consumes in a typical day. When starting off, try to count the calories you are consuming as accurately as possible. Monitor your weight over a few weeks and find your average caloric consumption based on that. Then use this to determine how much calories you should be consuming to get to the desired weight within the desired period.
• Carbs - Avoid too many carbs and definitely avoid high glycemic index carbs as much as possible. This is anything with simple carbs that the body breaks up easily. They are great to give you quick boosts of energy but they also fluctuate your glucose levels, and make you feel hungry sooner. This makes it hard to eat within a caloric limit and gives the unpleasant sugar highs and lows. That said, carbs are a macronutrient so don’t eliminate them completely. In fact they may help when trying to push your body harder in your workouts.
• Proteins - Protein is essential for your body to create and grow muscle tissue. It’s hard to get enough protein for muscle growth just from food sources without messing up total calories so supplements help. Get 25% or more of your daily calories from high quality protein when trying to gain muscle.
• Diets - Some of the recommended diets are intermittent fasting (IF), keto, paleo, vegetarian, vegan, etc. These diets have impacts beyond just your body weight but I would not get into them for this post. For your question, the most important aspect of all these diets is that they make it easier to manage your caloric intake. All these diets would also generally help you get the right macronutrients. I would suggest reading about them, finding what resonates with you and giving some a shot.
• Muscle - Compound exercise weight training with exercises that work multiple muscles, like squats, deadlifts, presses, and chin ups are good for beginners. Form is more important than the weight. Some people can get into very good shape with calisthenics only. Try to avoid machines in the beginning. Weight machines work fewer muscles at a time and don’t contribute to improving balance. As you learn more about your body and the exercises, you can add and modify them to what suits you the best.
• Sleep - Get good sleep and maintain your mental health. Sleep is essential for your body to work its magic of building muscle. And, if any of the above is making you miserable, it will be hard to stick with it for the long term. What even would be the point of looking great if you don’t feel good!

Personally, I’ve never been able to gain muscle and reduce weight at the same time. This means my total muscle mass is not increasing however my body is getting more in shape (which is what I’m trying to do). For some people they are able to gain muscle mass despite losing weight especially if they are just starting out with weight training. Don’t be discouraged if you fall in the first group. Once you understand your caloric intake and body, you can modify your diet and exercise to make it work for your goals.

Thanks for sharing your insights.

I’m curious why instances offering free search are defederated? I would have guessed everyone wants better search. Is it because of privacy concerns or instances don’t want to be indexed or have traffic directed elsewhere?

I was hoping that if I index only for the purpose of embeddings (which would prevent recreating the original content) and only share urls to the content that it should eliminate privacy and traffic concerns.

I’m still in the process of understanding how and if this would work. It’s only a personal project at this stage but you are right cpu/gpu and vector stores would be things I’d need to consider.

I’m glad you got it going.

Apple attaches your iCloud account when you share a shortcut and I’m not sure about their policy on a shortcut like this, hence the screenshot.

If you find a better website for bypassing paywalls, please post here.

Some other factors that I have noticed -

• Since most of the democracies determine the result based on first past the post (FPTP) or closely related voting system, the candidates only need to get 50% of the voting population to agree with them. They focus on populist policies that resonate with at least 50.1% of the population even if those policies will be detrimental to the remaining 49.9%.
• The opposition is not seen as strong enough to lead the country. This was the case in recent Turkish elections and has been the case in the last 3 Indian elections. Erdogan and Modi keep winning because people who don’t want to vote for them are not convinced by the other candidates’ abilities to lead the country. So many of the opposing people don’t vote at all or have their votes fragmented across multiple candidates in FPTP systems. That was and also remains the concern with Biden in the US.
• Once these leaders are in power, they actively suppress the voice of the minorities, by controlling the media and law enforcement, or by making it harder for minorities to vote and express themselves. This reduces the total voting population in favor of these leaders which again benefits them get past the 50% votes. Ultimately, we observe the vicious cycle of more power consolidation over time and more authoritarianism.