Please suggest some good self-hostable RAG for my LLM.
A while ago, I had requested help with using LLMs to manage all my teaching notes. I have since installed Ollama and been playing with it to get a feel for the setup.
I was also suggested the use of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation ) and CA (cognitive architecture). However, I am unclear on good self hosted options for these two tasks. Could you please suggest a few?
For example, I tried ragflow.io and installed it on my system, but it seems I need to setup an account with a username and password to use it. It remains unclear if I can use the system offline like the base ollama model, and that information won't be sent from my computer system.
Why not use this and select whatever LLM to leverage as a RAG? It literally allows you to self host the model and select any model for both chat and RAG analysis. I have it set to Hermes3 8B for chat and a 1.3B Llama3 as the RAG.
I personally use exui for a lot of my LLM work, but that's because I'm an uber minimalist.
And on your setup, I would host the best model you can on kobold.cpp or the built-in llama.cpp server (just not Ollama) and use Open Web UI as your front end. You can also use llama.cpp to host an embeddings model for RAG, if you wish.
...But generally, I prefer to not mess with RAG retrieval and just slap the context I want into the LLM myself, and for this, the performance of your machine is kind of critical (depending on just how much "context" you want it to cover). I know this is !selfhosted, but once you get your setup dialed in, you may consider making calls to an API like Groq, Cerebras or whatever, or even renting a Runpod GPU instance if that's in your time/money budget.
I’m new to this and I was wondering why you don’t recommend ollama? This is the first one I managed to run and it seemed decent but if there are better alternatives I’m interested
Edit: it seems the two others don’t have an API. What would you recommend if you need an API?
Text-generation-webui is cool, but also kinda crufty. Honestly a lot of the stuff is holdovers from what's now ancient history in LLM land, and it has (for me) major performance issues at longer context.
I'm not sure how well it would work in a self-hosted or server-type context, but GPT4all has built in RAG functionality. There's also a flatpak in addition to the Windows, Mac and .deb installs.