OK you read the headline.
Imagine if Caliber had an AI tool that trained itself on all its books such that a user could ask a question regarding those specific books. And then extrapolate. Imagine if anyone anywhere could then ask questions to your local AI and get answers without actually sharing your books.
Right now I host my own Caliber server but I don’t even know if I can search a term and get a particular book that contains thar term. I think it can search the title and metadata. I’m probably wrong. But the point is that it could be so much more. And it could circumvent the copyright laws that have always held back knowledge.
Like maybe my car broke down and I could ask IA why and how to fix it. Then it would start asking for the make and model and what sort of sounds it made. It would then search forums, our books and formulate an answer composed in the form of a book specifically written for me about my car’s particular problem and how to solve it. Maybe better just a speech that you could listen to while fixing the car step by step…“now look a little to the left and you’ll find a large box with 3 screws…”
It would be awesome to have that locally for my books and have access to everyone else’s knowledge in books too.
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You’re thinking of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with a vector database. Its something that’s being actively developed. I haven’t had time to dig much into it, especially currently. But the terms themselves should give you a starting point.
Edit: a quick google gives what could be a promising starting point https://huggingface.co/learn/cookbook/rag_llamaindex_librarian
Rag is fucking awesome, But in its current state it can’t handle unlimited amounts of data. On consumer machines I think you can throw around 100 megs at it before it starts losing it That’s quite a lot of text, but not really a decent collection of books. They might be able to get away with separating the books into categories and adding them as different knowledge bases. They’d have to select which knowledge base they wanted to ask but if they could keep the size down it might work relatively well
I fed mine about a year’s worth of slack traffic from work. I would ask it how many times people had trouble with a certain system. It would say three, meanwhile there were 500 tickets in the system of people having trouble with it.
No if I asked it about those three things it would have great detail. I can even ask it for sentiment of people that were talking about it It would recognize reasonably well if they were upset, understanding or angry.
Not quite what you’re asking for, but you can self-host ollama. And based on some recent lawsuits against meta, I’m pretty sure all companies are using as many books as they can get their hands on to train their models. And so their training set contains the books you have in Calibre and more.
Try asking llama3.3 or whichever model you choose your questions.
Do you know how any of this works?
If copyright were magically not an issue, why does this need to be local/self hosted?
Like sure, some people will still self host and we need some people to keep information independent of corporations. But for people who just want a summary of a car maintenance task, why would they go to a local repository instead of the largest one they can find?
Because those who dedicate themselves to finding the best information would have the best AI specific to that information. I would want my question routed to Joe’s shop and not jiffy lubes shop.
Maybe your question is about photography or maybe specific to photography chemistry or maybe to the mechanisms of a shutter or maybe you want to known how to setup a second curtain flash or maybe you want to known what specific wavelengths your first doublet filters for or what wavefront shape the light beam reflecting off the camera’s sensor will have or what sort of material can absorb it best so it doesn’t reflect back as a haze. Who knows! Well the very best people who do that sort of thing know, and they got all the books about it! So why not share that information if the books are just sitting there every day just collecting dust.
Sure something like this hasn’t been done yet. But its not because it can’t be done. Its because it’s difficult to do. But all the pieces are already there. We just need a few good puzzle masters to put it all together.
Ah, you want specialized instead of general.
Well, then is a couple of books enough to train your LLM? How many books are there on wavelengths your first doublet filters for?
Seems like you might want a forum full of topic specific comments too to feed into the model. A photography textbook with a section on lenses is good, real questions and answers from actual photographers with real scenarios would be better for most people.
Not just that but. My own notes from say Joplin. Can it consume those and expand my knowledge based on things I’ve already done and results I’ve already tried. And that’s still just an example. I could be a race car driver learning a particular race way or a set of other drivers etc.
