Tim Osterhus

How Tim turned bugs into features

Limitations and workarounds

This runs from Tim's own desktop, not a cloud chatbot provider. That makes it more impressive from a "work with what you got" standpoint, but it also means uptime will be uneven: model tests, hardware maintenance, power issues, heat, network outages, and all of the realities of serving a local AI system from consumer hardware in rural Hawaii can temporarily take it offline.

Further, because his GPU's memory is very low, the capability of the supported models have many limitations. But everyone knows that necessity is the mother of invention. Here's a list of some of the issues resulting from Tim's rather constrained environment, and what he did to fix it.

Poor instruction following

Problem: Most compatible models are simply too weak for reliable instruction following.

Solution: Properly fine-tuning a tiny model often results in performance akin to a much bigger model on a single type of task, at the cost of being worse at all others.