Do you know of any good paid API providers offering LLAVA? I want to experiment with it out a bunch more without having to host it locally myself.
Locally it's actually quite easy to setup. I've made an app https://recurse.chat/ which supports Llava 1.6. It takes a zero-config approach so you can just start chatting and the app downloads the model for you.
What's your reservation about running it locally?
using it now on desktop (I am in China, so no OpenAI here) and in cloud cluster on project.