I am a teacher and I have a LOT of different literature material that I wish to study, and play around with.
I wish to have a self-hosted and reasonably smart LLM into which I can feed all the textual material I have generated over the years. I would be interested to see if this model can answer some of my subjective course questions that I have set over my exams, or write small paragraphs about the topic I teach.
In terms of hardware, I have an old Lenovo laptop with an NVIDIA graphics card.
P.S: I am not technically very experienced. I run Linux and can do very basic stuff. Never self hosted anything other than LibreTranslate and a pihole!
Probably better to ask on !localllama@sh.itjust.works. Ollama should be able to give you a decent LLM, and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) will let it reference your dataset.
The only issue is that you asked for a smart model, which usually means a larger one, plus the RAG portion consumes even more memory, which may be more than a typical laptop can handle. Smaller models have a higher tendency to hallucinate - produce incorrect answers.
Short answer - yes, you can do it. It’s just a matter of how much RAM you have available and how long you’re willing to wait for an answer.