There are several use cases where you don't want to connect to a commercial AI service. For example:
You are just getting into AI-assisted content authoring, and would not like to commit to a commercial service.
“Open source” / open weight models running on a local machine are perfectly adequate for your use case.
You are unwilling, or prohibited, from sending data to a commercial AI service.
Your company already has an AI / inference infrastructure.
The good news is that AITiny, unlike many other solutions for Joomla, does not mandate the use of a specific AI service. It can work with anything that has an OpenAI-compatible API such as Ollama (see their blog post), LM Studio, Jan, etc.
Unlike commercial AI services, locally hosted AI services will not have a fairly unchanging list of available models. You can download new models to try them out, and delete ones already downloaded to free up disk space.
The default caching time for AITiny's models list is 24 hours. If you change the list of models in your locally hosted AI server within that time period you need to click the Reload button next to the model drop-down list in the AITiny plugin's configuration page.
Due to Joomla restrictions, there are two cases where the Reload button will not work:
The System - AITiny plugin is unpublished, or otherwise its Access is set to such that your current user cannot access the plugin (e.g. you are a Super User and the plugin's access is set to Guest).
The model selection drop-down field was disabled due to an error when you first opened the AITiny plugin's configuration page.
In those cases, you must try a workaround to reload the model list.
First, make sure the AI service configuration is correct, then click on the button. In most cases this is enough.
If that was not enough, you can go for the more thorough workaround:
Go to your site's backend.
From the sidebar, click on .
In the System page look under the Maintenance card and click on .
Select the plg_system_aitiny Cache Group.
Click on in the toolbar
Go back to the AITiny plugin's settings page to see the new list of models.