PrivateGPT: Free Offline AI PDF Chat (Tutorial)

Ever wished you could have a private conversation with your documents without sending them to the cloud? Well, now you can! Let’s dive into PrivateGPT, an open-source project that’s been making waves recently. It lets you chat with your documents 100% offline using local language models on your machine. No more worrying about your sensitive data being sent to OpenAI or any other company.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to set up PrivateGPT on your machine, ingest your documents, and start chatting with them in just a few minutes. Let’s get started!

What You’ll Need

• A computer with Python installed
• Basic familiarity with the command line
• Some documents you want to chat with (PDFs or text files)

Step 1: Download and Set Up PrivateGPT

1. Head over to the PrivateGPT GitHub repository and download the ZIP file.
2. Unzip the files and open the folder in your favorite code editor (I’m using VS Code).
3. Create a new folder called models in the project directory.
4. Download the required language models from the links provided in the GitHub repo.
5. Move the downloaded model files into the models folder you just created.

Step 2: Install Dependencies

Open a terminal in your project directory and run:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

This will install all the necessary libraries for PrivateGPT to work.

Step 3: Add PDF Support (Optional)

If you want to use PDF files, you’ll need to make a small modification to the ingest.py file:

1. 1. Open ingest.py in your code editor.
   2. Add the following import at the top of the file:

from langchain.document_loaders import PyPDFLoader
import os

1. 1. Replace the existing document loading code with this:

if file.endswith('.pdf'):
    loader = PyPDFLoader(os.path.join(source_directory, file))
else:
    loader = UnstructuredFileLoader(os.path.join(source_directory, file))

1. 1. Save the file.
   2. Install the PyPDF library by running:

pip3 install PyPDF2

Step 4: Ingest Your Documents

1. 1. Place the documents you want to chat with in the source_documents folder.
   2. In the terminal, run:

python3 ingest.py source_documents/your_file_name.pdf

Replace your_file_name.pdf with the name of your document. This process might take a few minutes, depending on the size of your document.

Step 5: Start Chatting!

Now for the fun part! Let’s start chatting with your documents:

1. 1. In the terminal, run:

python3 privateGPT.py

1. Wait for the models to load (this might take a minute).
2. When you see “Enter a query:”, type in your question about the document.
3. Press Enter and watch as PrivateGPT analyzes your document and provides an answer!

For example, if you ingested a document about NATO, you might ask:

> Enter a query: What did the president say about NATO?

PrivateGPT will process your question and provide an answer based on the content of your document.

Troubleshooting

If you run into any issues:

• Double-check that you’ve followed all the steps correctly.
• Make sure all the required models are in the models folder.
• If you see tokenization errors, don’t worry – these are common and usually don’t affect the overall functionality.

Wrap-Up

And there you have it! You’ve successfully set up PrivateGPT and can now chat with your documents offline and privately. This tool opens up a world of possibilities for analyzing documents without compromising privacy.

Remember, technology is always evolving, so be sure to check the PrivateGPT GitHub repository for the latest updates and instructions.

Happy chatting with your documents!

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