The Tuesday meeting came at exactly the right time; My managers want to tick off the AI box, so I've been trying to become informed to prevent any disastrous outcomes, squashing my network automation efforts. I was thrilled to find out just how easy it was to self-host these models, and that it was feasible to do it on a mini PC, like my Beelink SER6 (small NUC-like mobile ryzen platform). I downloaded the model last night, and to my surprise, the performance was more than adequate. The model was able to reason & give seemingly good results, despite my box being at the very low end of "AI performance". The bad news is that, all this hype about "Agentic AI" and all the other cool "tool models" isn't really fully available yet, in a format that can be hosted well on my box -- let alone a box I can afford. To make matters worse, it also seems that distilled models aren't really 1:1 Deepseek R1. Rather, they're more-so the same old meta model, trained off of R1's reasoning & results. So it's not always comparing apples to apples, when people discuss their results. When I dug deeper into what's going on in "Agentic AI", especially in the network automation space, the results are currently more trivial than I could've imagined. They also currently rely on cloud API access, since you need the big hosted models... something that I would never condone in my environment, no matter how much the google whitepaper assures that "extensions" and "function calling" help with this concern. Anyway, it's neat that I can have this little chat bot or coding assistant hosted on a little cube on my desk; however, it seems that it's still quite far away that I can have little AI interns working on generating insightful signals for my automation workflows. Some additional reading I found interesting: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.15030 https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04249 https://angiejones.tech/system-access-for-ai-agents/ https://antirez.com/news/146 Thanks, everyone. See you at the next meeting! Warm regards, -- Mark Prosser // E: mark@zealnetworks.ca // W: https://zealnetworks.ca