alt Hacker NewsYeah, that's a fair point at first glance. 50GB might not sound like a huge burden for a modern SSD.
However, the 50GB figure was just a starting point for emails. A true "local Jarvis," would need to index everything: all your code repositories, documents, notes, and chat histories. That raw data can easily be hundreds of gigabytes.
For a 200GB text corpus, a traditional vector index can swell to >500GB. At that point, it's no longer a "meager" requirement. It becomes a heavy "tax" on your primary drive, which is often non-upgradable on modern laptops.
The goal for practical local AI shouldn't just be that it's possible, but that it's also lightweight and sustainable. That's the problem we focused on: making a comprehensive local knowledge base feasible without forcing users to dedicate half their SSD to a single index.
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Question: would it be possible to invert the problem? I.e., rather than decreasing the size of the RAG — use the RAG to compress everything other than the RAG index itself.
E.g., design a filesystem so that the RAG index is part of / managed internally within the metadata of the filesystem itself; and then, for each FS inode data-extent, give it two polymorphic on-disk representations:
1. extents hold raw data; rag-vectors are derivatives and updated after extent is updated (as today)
2. rag-vectors are canonical; extents hold residuals from a predictive-coding model that took the rag-vectors as input and tried to regenerate the raw data of the extent. When extent is read [or partially overwritten], use predictive-coding model to generate data from vectors and then repair it with residue (as in modern video-codec p-frame generation.)
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Of course, even if this did work (in the sense of providing a meaningful decrease in storage use), this storage model would only really be practical for document files that are read entirely on open and atomically overwritten/updated (think Word and Excel docs, PDFs, PSDs, etc), not for files meant to be streamed.
But, luckily, the types of files this technique are amenable to are exactly the same types of files that a “user’s documents” RAG would have any hope of indexing in the first place!
While your aims are undoutably sincere, in practice for the 'local ai' target people building their own rigs usually have. 4TB or more fast ssd storage.
The bottom tier (not meant disparagingly) are people running diffusion models as these do not have the high vram requirements. They generate tons of images or video, going form a one-click instally like Easydiffusion to very sophisticated workflows in comfyui.
For those going the LLM route, which would be your target audience, they quickly run into the problemm that to go beyond toying around, the hardware and software requirements and expertise grows exponential beyong just toying around with small, highly quantized model with small context windows.
Inlight of the typical enthusiast investments in this space, the few TB of fast storage will pale in comparison to the rest of the expenses.
Again, your work is absolutely valuable, it is just that the storage space requirement for the vector store in this particular scenario is not your strongest card to play.
The DGX Spark being just $3-4,000 with 4TB of storage, 128GB unified memory, etc (or the Mac Studio tbh) is a great indicator that Local AI can soon be cheap and, along with the emerging routing and expert mixing strategies, incredibly performant for daily needs.
That's the size of just two or three triple A games nowadays.
You already need very high end hardware to run useful local LLMs, I don't know if a 200gb vector database will be the dealbreaker in that scenario. But I wonder how small you could get it with compression and quantization on top