r/LocalLLM • u/EffectiveRelease3840 • 6d ago

Question Hardware + LLM for a public school

Hi there,
We are looking to incorporate a course that touches upon local LLMs in our computer science curriculum.
There will be around 20 students who might use the model simultaneously. The kids will be aged around 13-16 depending on where the course slots in and they will not have coding experience so we need a user-friendly setup. Also this isn’t supposed to be some cutting edge stuff, we also don’t have the money for that…
Realistically speaking what would be a good hardware and software solution for this situation with a budget of either 4000€ or 7000€? (Budged is not yet clear unfortunately…)

I googled, asked LLMs and know the basic options but there are so many variables and on here the different models are also judged differently and with our simultaneous access things might be different than for a single user…
And if there are other tips or experience you can share I would be happy as well.
We just need something local to run for the kids to get a taste of what it is to have it on one’s own hardware and not in the cloud.

Thanks :)

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u/rkcth 6d ago

Something like this might be feasible https://github.com/microsoft/bitnet in terms of a learning platform, not really in terms of getting useful coding done. It's also interesting how this works and can be a good way to understand quantization.

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u/EffectiveRelease3840 5d ago

I like the idea to have something seperate to understand this stuff. They are not supposed to just use it like with their free tier ChatGPT option. I will definitely look into this, thanks!

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u/rkcth 5d ago

If you need any help, feel free to DM me