this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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I've cancelled my subscription yesterday, conveniently it was about to renew at the end of the week, so I have a few days to migrate from Proton, here's what I'm thinking of, but I'd love to hear what other people are switching to

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[–] communism@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (2 children)

I have a lower-end GPU (8GB VRAM) and I can still run smaller models on it with decent performance.

[–] birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Dumb question: what do people use those local LLMs even for?

[–] communism@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago

Not much, but you can use it for basically anything people use frontier models for, it'll just be somewhat dumber. I occasionally run LLMs for proof-reading important things that I've already hand-written and edited. Sometimes for bouncing off ideas. Sometimes for the kinds of questions I'd normally chuck at a forum but I can get a quicker answer if I ask an LLM. No, I don't "trust" the answers; anything where I can't just use my own judgement, the LLM will have given me enough to perform my own research to fact-check it.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

What does "lower-end" mean in this case? 8GB VRAM could be anything from a 2014 Radeon R9 290X to a 2026 RTX 5060.

[–] communism@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Radeon RX 7600, but yes, you're right, it's relative. It's good enough for any gaming I do, which is not an awful lot. I think it's considered mid-range for its generation, I guess I was just thinking of the GPUs I see people mention they have which seem much beefier than mine lol.

I'm no AI expert but when I looked into it, it seemed that VRAM was the biggest factor being mentioned in discussions of GPUs, hence why I mentioned it.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

I’m no AI expert but when I looked into it, it seemed that VRAM was the biggest factor being mentioned in discussions of GPUs, hence why I mentioned it.

I could be wrong, but I think there are differences not just in FLOPS but perhaps more importantly in what kinds of functions are supported (with newer GPUs becoming gradually more general-purpose), so I'm not sure if the GPU from 2014 is capable of running AI models at all (slowly or otherwise).

I actually kinda want to find out, because my old GPU is a Vega 56 (which is also 8GB) and I'm not sure if it would be useful or not.