I am working on a "Catholic AI" project these days.

For an introduction to AI from a Catholic standpoint:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/qRzsQpxXzcFe

I will be needing as many books (PDFs, ebooks, etc.) as possible, to load into a special database that the AI will be aware of, to better inform its answers.
For the nerds out there, I will be creating an agentic RAG setup.

Just running a local LLM (AI model) is not enough; you need to provide specific data for your use case -- in our case, it will be Traditional Catholic (pre-Vatican 2) material -- Catholic doctrine, saints, history, Liturgy, Canon Law, theology, philosophy, etc.

I will be creating a webpage so people can easily upload such files from their computer, laptop, or phone. But for now, start collecting your stuff. If you want, you can e-mail it to

matthew@cathinfo.com

But obviously there is an attachment size limit for most e-mail systems. Probably around 10 or 12 MB or so.
That is why I'm coming up with an uploading program -- it's part of the overall project -- so I can accept multi-gigabyte zip files.

I am also accepting WEBPAGES, torrents, or other archives where I can easily download such content.
I have a program to download "all PDFs on this webpage" with 1 click. So if I just have the webpage URL, getting the books off it is easy.

So far I have local models successfully running on my personal (rather decent) tower/workstation PC.
I will use these local models to do my software development work, since I don't have a subscription to any of the AI models (including Cursor, the famous software development IDE with AI features built-in. That costs $20/month). And no, I'm not seeking such a subscription either. For those wishing to contribute to this project, I am using my Amazon wishlist (see link in my signature below). The main requirement for a project like this is video card(s). Since most people don't have $300 to donate, I can only suggest the Amazon gift cards (which can be any amount), so I can combine them to make such a $300 purchase.

I have done a lot of research already, to make sure this project is feasible. I can expose my locally-running "Catholic AI" to the Internet at large. I will certainly require a CathInfo login to access it. I can have multiple video cards, and share requests between them using various software. I know what is possible with AI and other software in general, so I have lots of plans (too much to go into detail here).

I plan to do something on this project every single day. There are a lot of aspects (or sub-projects) to it. But the whole thing is interesting to me, much more so than apps or other software, which are almost impossible to promote without a marketing budget. AI is all the rage right now, so experience with AI and associated technologies looks great on one's resume. Especially if you're pushing 50.

And I truly believe that AI, as it exists today, is truly useful and powerful. But we need one geared towards Traditional Catholics. And privacy is another issue with all these commercial big-name models like ChatGPT. Having one's personal thoughts, docuмents, and information sent to Google/OpenAI/Elon Musk/China, and/or sold to the highest bidder, is not a great thing. 

I plan to see just how far I can take this.

Great idea!  Would this site be helpful?  https://www.traditionalcatholic.co/free-catholicbooks/

Internet Archive has many as well!

Thecatholicarchive.com

When you say HDD's dies completely when they die, aren't SDD's more so? At least with a HDD you have a disk that may still contain information, but at some point the SDD chips stop working, though maybe you could take it apart and salvage the info off of the working chips.

Do you run a combination of both? High speed HDD's as an archive for the even faster, but cycle limited SDD's?

Ok, I finally got the uploader done!

https://www.cathinfo.com/upload/

You can upload very large files, up to 4 GB. This will accommodate things like ZIP files with all your ebooks, PDFs, etc.

You can upload many files at once. Each file has a "progress bar" so you can see the uploading progress.
You can also click the red "X" if you need to remove some of the files, before you click "Upload".

Thank you!

Ok I got the books from all 3 of those links. If anyone has any favorite e-books, PDFs of pre-Vatican II Catholic books, please send them on, using this convenient uploader:

https://www.cathinfo.com/upload/

I got the St. Isidore book collection. Someone PMed me a link to the forum, telling how to download all the books at once. Thanks for the help.

EDIT: Actually, it would be more accurate to say "am successfully getting" the book collection. I got 73 GB of them, but it's still downloading.