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Oobabooga is a pretty beginner-friendly solution for running LLMs locally. Models are freely available on Huggingface, but look for GGUF quantizations that will fit in your VRAM. The good thing about GGUFs is that they’re typically offered in a wide range of sizes so you can pick one that will fit on your GPU. If you use all your VRAM and start offloading to system memory then the generation will be far slower.
I’ve had the best results with Noromaid20B and Rose20B quants running on a 16GB 4080. Don’t expect it to be as smart as GPT 4.0, but those models do a pretty good job of following instruction and writing decent prose.
Once you mess around with Oobabooga a bit, I’d highly recommend picking up the SillyTavern front-end. Oobabooga runs the actual model while SillyTavern manages characters, world lore, and offers a wide range of other features including a “visual novel” mode where you can set up character sprites that emote based on the content of the messages. It takes a while to get the hang of but it’s pretty cool.
There are a series of quants available at much smaller sizes such that you don’t need the full size model. The full fp16 model is 23 GB but the fp8 quant is half that, and there are GGUF quants down to 6.8 GB.