My First Small AI Project for my company

Hi everyone!

I just wrapped up my first little project at the company I work for: a simple RAG chatbot able to help my colleagues in the assistance department based on internal reports on common issues, manuals, standard procedures and website pages for general knowledge on the company / product links.

I built it using LangChain for vector DB search and Flutter for the UI, locally hosted on a RPi.

I had fun trying to squeeze as much performance as possible from old office hardware. I experimented with small and quantized models (mostly from Bartosky [thanks for those!]). Unfortunately and as supposed, not even a LLaMA 3.2 1B Q4 couldn't hit decent speeds (> 1 token/s). So, while waiting for GPUs, I'm testing Mistral, groq (really fast inference!!) and other few providers through their APIs.

AI development has become a real hobby for me, even though my background is in a different type of engineering. I spend my "free" time at work (simple but time-consuming tasks) listening model-testing, try to learn how neural networks work, or with hands on video like Google Colab tutorials. I know I won't become a researcher publishing papers or a top developer in the field, but I’d love to get better.

What would you recommend I focus on or study to improve as an AI developer?

Thanks in advance for any advice!