Can any devs help me find a solution for this?

Building a game and when a user guesses word X, I want to see if it's sufficiently similar to word Y. could I deploy some kind of mini, local LLM inside my codebase for this? ideally don't want to wait / pay each time for an openai api call.

An LLM might be overkill here, you could just use word embedding vectors and check the similarity between the guess word and the target. Check out the usages here: https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/models/word2vec.html (grep for model.wv.most_similar)

founder of eventcaster (@event / events.xyz), hosting /latenightcrew, member of 🍊 dao