Okay, so I tried out this thing called “Downs After Dark 2024”. It was kinda interesting, and I thought I’d share how it went.
Getting Started
First off, I heard about this from some people online talking about large language models, you know, those AI things. They mentioned “Downs After Dark” as a place to mess around with Llama, some model by Meta AI. I was curious because I wanted something that could run on my old computer. My GPU isn’t the best, just a 1650 with 4GB, so I needed something that wouldn’t kill my machine.
Figuring it Out
Finding the right stuff was a bit of a pain. The online community has many instructions, but they’re all over the place. I spent a good chunk of time just reading through posts and comments, trying to piece together what I actually needed to download and how to set it up. Eventually, I figured out the basic steps. There were some configurations, some setup, and some downloads, but I finally got there.
Running the Model
Once I got everything in place, I started playing around with the model. I fed it some prompts, asked it some questions, just to see what it could do. Honestly, it was pretty cool. It generated text that actually made sense most of the time. I even tried to get it to write some stories and stuff, and it did a decent job. It wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely impressive, especially considering my weak GPU. It was a bit slow on responses, but I managed to do it.
Dealing with Issues
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. I ran into a few hiccups along the way. Sometimes the model would just freeze up, or it would start spitting out gibberish. I had to do some troubleshooting, restarting the program, and tweaking some settings. A few times, I even had to start over completely. It was frustrating, but I learned a lot in the process. I found that asking simpler questions got me better results. If I asked complicated questions, it struggled a lot.
Final Thoughts
All in all, messing with “Downs After Dark 2024” was a fun experience. I managed to get a large language model running on my less-than-ideal setup, and I even got some useful output from it. I would recommend that if your hardware is not good, you can try using the CPU. I tried it myself and it worked. It’s not something I’d use every day, but it was definitely a cool project to tackle. If you’re into this kind of stuff, it’s worth checking out. Just be prepared to put in some work to get it running. This thing is pretty cool, and I recommend it.
