July 21, 2023

💬 Using GPT4All.. on a Mac Pro 2013

I fully admit this might have been a bad idea. I found that you could load GPT4All onto your local machine and that it was available for Mac. Since 2013 supports Monterey, I decided to give it a shot. The install was a breeze and in a few minutes I was downloading the recommended model and database – Hermes at 13GB. With that done, it was time to give local AI a try. And that’s when the joyfulness was over. I’m not going to say a Mac Pro 2013 was the right machine for the job, but the processing of my request took minutes to complete, and the result was typed out like it was 1980 and I was on a 300 baud dial-up connection. The response is measured in tokens per second and it never got into the double digits. It crawled along at 6-8 max with lots of pauses. Maybe the AI engine was as annoyed as I […]

July 18, 2023

💻 Some fun with the AI Language Model

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a great time using the AI Language Model for research and education. It’s an extremely helpful interactive tutor where I can ask questions like: Instead of wondering how to phrase your question so the search engine can find a relevant web page, seems to parse the question quite well. I think the AI Language Model is amazing with lots of topics you can explore. And in the last few months things have change dramatically. OpenAI isn’t the only game in town. AI Servers are sprouting up all over the place. There are general purpose servers, copy writing server, story writing servers, interactive servers, and I’m sure more are on the way. Of course, not all of these servers are created equal. In far too many cases you’ll need to sign up and make an account, which is a one-way ticket to SpamVille. I wanted to try out SudoWrite, and after three days of […]

July 16, 2023

🔤 Text Expansion for Windows

Simply put, text expansion on Windows makes me sad. Microsoft offers AutoComplete so I guess people think that’s good enough. AutoComplete, or AutoCorrect, are nowhere near as powerful or useful as text expansion. And that doesn’t help when you’re in someone else’s app. Text expansion on the Mac works out of the box. It’s part of the OS and is an integral part of getting work done efficiently. All you need to do is go into the Keyboard shortcuts of System Preference and set up what you need. If you need more options, bigger lists, prompts and date insertion – there are multiple apps to choose from like, TypeIt4Me, aText, Rocket, Rocket Typist, and Typinator. Once you’ve set up your expansion sets, they can be shared across machines. I have TypeIt4Me sets stored in iCloud, so as soon as it was installed on my 2013 Mac Pro, the expansions were ready to use. I have hundreds of TypeIt4Me trigger keywords, […]

July 13, 2023

🖼️ Having some fun with AI Image Generation

Since I’m messing around with the Language Model side of AI, I decided to have a look at the Image Generation aspect. Not going to lie, it’s pretty amazing. You type in a few keywords and a couple seconds later out pops a picture. That alone is impressive, but it’s not some copy/paste job, it’s a composed image. And there are some amazing renders out there, like Cloud cities, representations of “artificial intelligence,” and some surrealist paintings that have an incredible level of detail. And let’s be honest, there are a whole of lot of nudes out there. The machines are being taught some unusual body proportions. Not every image is a gem, but considering what’s going on in the background of taking different kinds of images and layering them together, it’s pretty impressive. Even the worst image is better than my best attempt. Of course, if you don’t like what you get, spin the wheel and try again. A […]

July 10, 2023

💵 Paying for computer cycles likes it’s 1969

It’s interesting to see all these AI servers popping up all over the web. Some are language models, while others are specifically for image generation. What’s also interesting is how these system harken back to the mainframe days where you need to pay to use the cycles. Want a more comprehensive answer? Pay for credits or buy a subscription. Want an image larger than a postage stamp? Want to use something other than the craptacular demo render model for an image? Want to move your request up in the queue? I can understand these. There is a fair bit of computing power at play for generating AI images. It’s just funny how this model is a mirror of the early days of computing. You may have stacks of CPUs, GPUs, and Ram, but no work is done on your machine. Regardless of your computer power, when you want to do something with AI, especially images, it’s nothing but a dumb […]

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