Posting self hosted software every day until we have communities - Day 7 - Open WebUI

Hi, it’s me. Your favorite Digg user. I had some Digg issues yesterday and couldn’t get the site to post. Sorry for the delay! Day 7, and we’re going to look into self-hosting LLMs with Open WebUI, a straightforward web interface that lets you chat with local models without learning curve of APIs or command-line interface. Using this tool, you’ll get a relatively simple setup going that looks close to ChatGPT in terms of UI. LLMs are a massive rabbit hole. Endless tweaking of system prompts, fine-tuning datasets, and scaling to GPU clusters. I’m not writing this entry the "ultimate" setup for enthusiasts chasing bleeding-edge performance, but if you're just starting, it's a solid on-ramp: run it alongside Ollama (some installers will take care of Llama for you) on a decent machine (8GB RAM minimum) and you're experimenting privately in minutes. No cloud bills (but hello electricity bills!), no data leaks, just your hardware doing the heavy lifting. Quick primer on models since the lingo isn’t always beginner friendly. The "parameters" number is basically the model's brain size. Each one is a tunable weight in its neural net, so a 7B (billion) model like Mistral 7B acts like a quick study for everyday chats or code snippets but sips resources (fits on a mid-range CPU). Bump to 13B or 70B like Llama 3.1, and it gets sharper at nuanced reasoning or long contexts, but you'll need beefier RAM (16GB+) or a GPU (VRAM) to avoid very long response times. Start small and pull Mistral or Phi-3 Mini in the UI, test a prompt and scale as you go. Open WebUI handles the front end, letting you switch models mid-chat or blend responses from multiples for better results. We spoke about SearXNG previously. You can integrate your self hosted SearXNG instance for extra privacy and to achieve web search with your private LLM. Queries route through it first, keeping your IP masked even if the underlying engines peek. Recent updates overhauled the chat input for cleaner attachments and tools, and the roadmap's teasing AI-powered notes (like a local Notion for jotting ideas with model help). This is so, so far from the end all be all of LLMs. I’ll cover other tools like KoboldCPP and Sillytavern down the road, but take a look at those if you’re more interested in diving in head first. GitHub repo: https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui