You can absolutely self host LLMs. HELM team has done an excellent job benchmarking the efficiency of different models for specific tasks so that would be a good place to start. You can balance model performance for your specific task with the model’s efficiency - in most situations, larger models are better performing but use more GPUs or are only available via APIs.

There are currently 3 different approaches to use AI for a custom task and application -

1. Train a base LLM from scratch - this is like creating your own GPT-by_autopilot model. This would be the maximum level of control, however the amount of compute, time, and data required for training does not make this an ideal approach for the end user. There are many open source base LLMs already published on HuggingFace that can be used instead.

2. Fine-tune a base LLM - starting with a base LLM, it can be fine tuned for a certain set of tasks. For example, you can fine tune a model to follow instructions or use as a chatbot. InstructGPT and GPT3.5+ are examples of fine tuned models. This approach allows you to create a model that can understand a specific domain or a set of instructions particularly well as compared to the base LLM. However, any time that training a large model is needed, it will be an expensive approach. If you are starting out, I’ll suggest exploring this as a v2 step for improving your model.

3. Prompt engineering or indexing using an existing LLM - starting with an existing model, create prompts to achieve your objective. This approach gives you the least control over the model itself, but is the most efficient. I would suggest this as the first approach to try. Langchain is the most widely used tool for prompt engineering and supports using self hosted base- or instruct-LLM. If your task is search and retrieval, an embeddings model is used. In this scenario, you generate embeddings for all your content and store the embeddings as vectors. For a user query, you then convert it to an embedding using the same model, and finally retrieve the most similar content based on vector similarity. Langchain provides this capability, but IMO, sentence-transformers may be a better starting point for a self hosted retrieval application. Without any intention to hijack this post, you can check out my project - synology-photos-nlp-search - as an example of a self hosted retrieval application.

To learn more, I have found the recent deeplearning.ai short courses to be quite good - they are short, comprehensive, and free.

Some other factors that I have noticed -

• Since most of the democracies determine the result based on first past the post (FPTP) or closely related voting system, the candidates only need to get 50% of the voting population to agree with them. They focus on populist policies that resonate with at least 50.1% of the population even if those policies will be detrimental to the remaining 49.9%.
• The opposition is not seen as strong enough to lead the country. This was the case in recent Turkish elections and has been the case in the last 3 Indian elections. Erdogan and Modi keep winning because people who don’t want to vote for them are not convinced by the other candidates’ abilities to lead the country. So many of the opposing people don’t vote at all or have their votes fragmented across multiple candidates in FPTP systems. That was and also remains the concern with Biden in the US.
• Once these leaders are in power, they actively suppress the voice of the minorities, by controlling the media and law enforcement, or by making it harder for minorities to vote and express themselves. This reduces the total voting population in favor of these leaders which again benefits them get past the 50% votes. Ultimately, we observe the vicious cycle of more power consolidation over time and more authoritarianism.