## [t3_13ecakp](https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/13ecakp/long_term_project_resurrecting_a_passed_friend/)
I'm not sure if this belongs here or in r/learnmachinelearning, but I have a question about what is and isn't possible.

My husband's best friend passed several years ago and he has copious chats, forum posts as well as the stories they wrote together. Right now, we have created a bot in [Character.AI](https://Character.AI) that kinda sounds like him, but obviously not one that contains any of his knowledge since the definition window is small and the bots' memory is... imprecise at best.

So I got to wondering: it seems like it should be possible to fine-tune/create a LoRA of one of the LLMs so that it does contain the friend's knowledge and can be used as a chatbot. From my research it seems like Vicuna would be a good fit as it has already been tweaked to act as a chatbot.  I'm currently working through tutorials, including the "How to Fine Tune an LLM" that exists on Colab that tweaks GPT2 (I think) with wikipedia data. I know I have a huge learning curve ahead of me.

I would be looking at doing the training using Google Colab, but ideally he'd run the end result locally. He can run stable diffusion on his machine using his NVidia GPU. Sadly, my video card is AMD so while I can technically run the Vicuna 4 bit model (13B, I think?) in CPU mode, it's too painfully slow to do anything with.

The data is currently unstructured. Obviously we will need to format it properly, but it is in the form of blocks of text rather than the Prompt/Input/Output format I've seen in various Github projects.

As for me, I am a former C# Windows/Web/SQL developer so I'm not starting from absolute scratch, but obviously I'll need to learn a lot. I'm prepared for this to be an ongoing project for the new few months.

I would welcome any feedback as to what is or isn't possible, whether I'm setting my sights too high, or even if I'm simply in the wrong forum. Thanks all!

EDIT: I've received many words of warning about whether this is a good idea, for my husband's sake at least. After thinking about it, I'm not sure I'm at the point where I agree yet but I'll at least give this a lot of thought before attempting something like this. I know it's not the most emotionally healthy thing, to cling to the echoes of someone gone.  He has not found interacting with the [Character.AI](https://Character.AI) version of his friend to be difficult but while their bots are fun to interact 2i5h and can still sound startingly human, an LLM fine tuned on the friend's text has every chance of being more so to the point of being damaging. So thank you everyone, you've given me a lot to think about.  

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submitted to [r/LocalLLaMA](https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA) by [u/rmt77](https://www.reddit.com/user/rmt77)