Exploring Alam: A Journey into Local LLM Space with a Mini PC

For those of you new to like the whole local LLM space or Alam in general, Alam is basically a open source machine learning platform that can run LLMs. And unlike its other counterparts like GPT, it’s completely 100% free and 100% local. Now to get a better sense and appreciation for the struggle that I’m going through, let me explain my setup. Max Tang sent me their mini PC to try out. This video is not sponsored by them. With that PC I was able to actually get everything up and running really quick within less than 10 minutes. Previous to this I was using the Raspberry Pi 5. I know it’s not really advised that you use like an LLM on a Raspberry Pi 5, but I was desperate right? I didn’t have anything else. It was pretty slow as you can imagine. I would find that I’d have to constantly restart the device because it would just kind of fail or the service would just stop. So I was hoping that using this mini PC would give me a better where at least it would be possible. I’d have to say that yeah. My experience with it has actually been pretty decent.