- If anyone is nervous about installing Node.js, you don't need to be. Node.js is an *extremely* widely used environment. It isn't going to give you a virus and it isn't spyware.
- The 7B Alpaca model is 4-5 GB, so make sure you have space on your hard drive. The model may take a while to download because of its size and because I believe it uses webtorrent to download it. There is also a 13B Alpaca model, which will be about twice as big, but should give better results.
- You will need ~5GB RAM for the 7B model and ~8GB RAM for the 13B model. If you aren't seeing results when you ask it things, restart it (ctrl-C and run the serve command again), and reissue the request with the "Debug" checkbox checked. If you see a "segmentation fault" that may be because you don't have enough RAM.
- btw, 7B and 13B refer to 7 billion and 13 billion model parameters respectively. These aren't "parameters" like knobs on an audio system that you can freely turn up or down. Each one of these parameters is just a number, a coefficient that the data gets multiplied by as it's processed. When he says you can "fine tune" the model, he means training the model to change these parameters -- that's what training is, searching through the space of possible parameters for ones that give good results.
- Regarding http://localhost:3000/ -- let's break that down. "HTTP" means it's using the HTTP protocol to communicate with the server (running on your machine). It is not HTTPS, which means it is not secure -- if anyone could snoop the traffic, they'd see clear text data, not encrypted data. I'll come back to that in a moment.
"localhost" is a special predefined hostname that basically all operating systems used to refer to themselves. localhost corresponds to 127.0.0.1, the loopback IP address, which also refers to oneself. So, even though you're accessing it through a browser, because it's "localhost", you're not sending packets to network beyond your computer.
":3000" just means that you're connecting to port 3000 on localhost. 3000 is just the default port on which the server runs. Ports are just a way of allowing multiple servers on one host.
- Note that following the instructions given above *does* (try to) open the server to listen for incoming *remote* connections on port 3000 as well.
The advantage is that if you want you could run the server on your computer, but connect to it through your phone (if your computer's firewall rules allow this -- on Windows it prompts you for permission to open a firewall hole for the application. Don't know about Mac). To do that you would have to know the hostname or IP address of your computer. Suppose the IP address (on your local network) is 192.168.1.100, then you could access it from your phone (while on your local network) by going to http://192.168.1.100:3000/ .
The downside to this is that, because it's going over HTTP and not HTTPS, if you're accessing it remotely, your requests and the returned responses can theoretically be snooped on.
Few things:
- If anyone is nervous about installing Node.js, you don't need to be. Node.js is an *extremely* widely used environment. It isn't going to give you a virus and it isn't spyware.
- The 7B Alpaca model is 4-5 GB, so make sure you have space on your hard drive. The model may take a while to download because of its size and because I believe it uses webtorrent to download it. There is also a 13B Alpaca model, which will be about twice as big, but should give better results.
- You will need ~5GB RAM for the 7B model and ~8GB RAM for the 13B model. If you aren't seeing results when you ask it things, restart it (ctrl-C and run the serve command again), and reissue the request with the "Debug" checkbox checked. If you see a "segmentation fault" that may be because you don't have enough RAM.
- btw, 7B and 13B refer to 7 billion and 13 billion model parameters respectively. These aren't "parameters" like knobs on an audio system that you can freely turn up or down. Each one of these parameters is just a number, a coefficient that the data gets multiplied by as it's processed. When he says you can "fine tune" the model, he means training the model to change these parameters -- that's what training is, searching through the space of possible parameters for ones that give good results.
- Regarding http://localhost:3000/ -- let's break that down. "HTTP" means it's using the HTTP protocol to communicate with the server (running on your machine). It is not HTTPS, which means it is not secure -- if anyone could snoop the traffic, they'd see clear text data, not encrypted data. I'll come back to that in a moment.
"localhost" is a special predefined hostname that basically all operating systems used to refer to themselves. localhost corresponds to 127.0.0.1, the loopback IP address, which also refers to oneself. So, even though you're accessing it through a browser, because it's "localhost", you're not sending packets to network beyond your computer.
":3000" just means that you're connecting to port 3000 on localhost. 3000 is just the default port on which the server runs. Ports are just a way of allowing multiple servers on one host.
- Note that following the instructions given above *does* (try to) open the server to listen for incoming *remote* connections on port 3000 as well.
The advantage is that if you want you could run the server on your computer, but connect to it through your phone (if your computer's firewall rules allow this -- on Windows it prompts you for permission to open a firewall hole for the application. Don't know about Mac). To do that you would have to know the hostname or IP address of your computer. Suppose the IP address (on your local network) is 192.168.1.100, then you could access it from your phone (while on your local network) by going to http://192.168.1.100:3000/ .
The downside to this is that, because it's going over HTTP and not HTTPS, if you're accessing it remotely, your requests and the returned responses can theoretically be snooped on.
I thought I understood English...I was wrong.
Thanks. I used this guide to install Alpaca and it worked flawlessly.