🛠️ The Core Stack (Tools We Deploy)
These are the foundational tools we use in our Private AI deployments.- Ollama
- The “Docker for LLMs.” The easiest way to get up and running with large language models locally on macOS, Linux, and Windows.
- n8n
- Workflow Automation. A fair-code alternative to Zapier/Make that is incredibly powerful for chaining AI agents together.
- Open WebUI (formerly Ollama WebUI)
- The Interface. An extensible, self-hosted UI that mimics the ChatGPT experience but connects to your private models.
📚 Learning & Documentation
- LocalLlama Subreddit (r/LocalLLaMA)
- The Community Hub. The single best place for bleeding-edge discussions on hardware, model quantization, and fine-tuning.
- DeepLearning.AI Short Courses
- Free Education. High-quality, 1-hour courses by Andrew Ng and industry partners (LangChain, Microsoft) on building with LLMs.
- Hugging Face Models
- The “GitHub of AI.” Browse thousands of open-source models. Look for “GGUF” formats for easy local hosting.
🤖 Model Leaderboards & News
- LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard
- Unbiased Rankings. A crowdsourced benchmark platform to see which models (proprietary vs. open source) are currently performing best.
- The AI Breakdown (Podcast/YouTube)
- Daily News. Excellent, hype-free daily analysis of the biggest news in AI.
- TLDR AI Newsletter
- Daily Digest. A quick, curated daily email summarizing new tools and research papers.
💻 Hardware for Self-Hosting
- Tim Dettmers’ GPU Guide
- Deep Dive. The definitive technical guide on choosing GPUs for deep learning and inference.
- Mac Studio for AI (Apple Silicon)
- Apple Silicon Focus. Discussions on how Unified Memory (RAM) on Macs makes them surprisingly powerful for running large models locally.
🚀 Starter Prompts & Engineering
- Anthropic Prompt Library
- Best Practices. Even if you don’t use Claude, their prompt engineering guides are industry-leading and applicable to Llama 3/Mistral.
- Learn Prompting
- Comprehensive Course. A free, open-source course on communicating effectively with AI.