Quick post about a change I made that’s worked out well.

I was using OpenAI API for automations in n8n — email summaries, content drafts, that kind of thing. Was spending ~$40/month.

Switched everything to Ollama running locally. The migration was pretty straightforward since n8n just hits an HTTP endpoint. Changed the URL from api.openai.com to localhost:11434 and updated the request format.

For most tasks (summarization, classification, drafting) the local models are good enough. Complex reasoning is worse but I don’t need that for automation workflows.

Hardware: i7 with 16GB RAM, running Llama 3 8B. Plenty fast for async tasks.

  • yellerbadger@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    4 hours ago

    IMO there’s a significant drop off with local LLMs vs the mainstream ones. This can be mitigated somewhat though by using web search tools or using retrieval augmented generation.

    • lepinkainen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Basically the local models don’t (and can’t) contain the full knowledge of the universe.

      BUT they can call tools pretty well and if you give the harness the capability to search Wikipedia for example, it becomes a lot smarter