Thanks to this post, and the other comments in here, I've discovered that the ultimate ui for ai-models may well be
https://github.com/ParisNeo/lollms-webui
and on HuggingFace ( that name is aweful: to me it is the creepy-horrible FaceHugger, from the movie Alien, that I saw so many decades ago ) TheBloke has some models which are smaller
https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/
so you can choose a model that will actually-work on your hardware.
I think Llama-2 for brainstorming & CodeLlama-instruct for learning programming examples seems to be the cleanest pair, from what I've read, and he's got GGUF versions with different quantizations, so you can choose what will actually-fit on your hardware.
There are other models on huggingface which seem very useful, like
- whisper-large-v3 for speech-to-text,
- whisperspeech for text-to-speech,
- sdxl-turbo for image-making ( for some copyright-free subjects to practice drawing with ), and so-on..
Some models require GPU, not all.
Damn things moved fast!