ChatGPT: 8 alternative Open Source

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ChatGPT: 8 alternative Open Source

There is no doubt, 2024 will be the year of Artificial Intelligences and generative language models. And what is the first name that comes to mind when talking about these technologies? Clearly that of ChatGPT. However, OpenAI's creation, based on the LLM ( Large Language Model ) GPT , is not the only solution of this type available on the market. Google, for example, launched the Bard project while Elon Musk's xAI is busy with its Grok.

In any case, not all AI-based platforms are proprietary or owned by large companies. There are also free and open alternatives, released under an Open Source license which enjoy a greater level of independence. We will soon see which ones, but first let's focus on the advantages of their use.


Why Use Open Source Alternatives to ChatGPT?

An Open Source project is associated with a "permissive" license that allows anyone with the necessary skills to study, modify, adopt and redistribute the source code of an application. This also allows you to voluntarily contribute to the development of the project itself, with a high degree of freedom in compliance with the license terms. This is therefore a first advantage, because the Open Source alternatives to ChatGPT are implemented in the context of communities interested in their improvement and security rather than profit logic.

Another advantage, we have already talked about in part, lies in the fact that there are no large companies behind these solutions. This means that you do not have to submit to their policies and contractual clauses that are often of a purely commercial nature. The open code also guarantees greater transparency and the ways in which the data processed by the models are treated are known. There is also a higher degree of customization and adaptation to individual needs and greater opportunities for savings in terms of investment. This is without considering that referring to a single platform, especially if proprietary, creates a condition of dependence which is negative by nature.

So what are the best Open Source alternatives to ChatGPT? We have selected 8 of the most popular and complete. The list proposed below is not intended to be exhaustive but rather a starting point for choosing the most suitable solution for your project.



ColossalChat




ColossalChat is a ChatGPT-style chatbot that represents the implementation of the Colossal-AI project . The basic generative model is Coati ( ColossalAI Talking Intelligence ), an LLM trained using the RLHF ( Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback ) machine learning technique . Thanks to it, machine learning is optimized through the feedback formulated by humans who evaluate its performance. In this way it is possible to verify in real time that the level of development achieved is adequate for the objectives set (understanding of prompts, accuracy of answers, ability to express oneself in natural language).

Vicuna





Vicuna (or in full Vicuna-13B) is an Open Source model trained through the tuning of LLaMA (Meta) and the conversations shared by users via ShareGPT , an extension for the Google Chrome web browser which allows you to make prompts and answers obtained available during interactions with the OpenAI platform. The outcome of the training was a service that manages to guarantee a quality level of approximately 90% compared to ChatGPT and Google Bard. Its results would then be even better than those of LLaMA.


HuggingChat




Hugging Face offers a wide range of pre-trained models, datasets and tools related to Artificial Intelligence technologies to help developers integrate machine learning models into their applications. This is a solution widely used by research communities and beyond to accelerate the deployment of AI-centric services. HuggingChat , the chatbot offered by the project, allows you to select the model to use (the default one is one of the Mistral AI variants) and supports the generation of outputs also through web searches.

OpenChatKit





Among the free and open alternatives to ChatGPT we also find OpenChatKit based on the RedPajama 7B Chat model . The latter was trained on the basis of 7 billion parameters with the aim of developing logical and consequential reasoning skills, supporting conversations in multiple sessions and acquiring useful knowledge for returning answers to user prompts. The chatbot is able to create summaries of large-scale texts, generate tables from the data provided as input, classify tasks and maintain a sense of context during a dialogue. The current development phase of the project is mainly focused on coding skills and factual knowledge aimed at problem solving.

H2oGPT





Another project that led to the creation of an AI based chatbot is H2oGPT . If you want to interact with the platform you can do so from this page , no registration is necessary. Among the features of the service there is support for a large variety of models, from LLaMa2 to Mistral AI, from Falcon to Vicuna via WizardLM. All the most used desktop operating systems are supported, including Linux, and the repository also provides installers for Windows and macOS. H2oGPT is compatible with OpenAI's Server Proxy API and Python client API.


GPT4All





GPT4All was created to "democratize" ChatGPT and LLMs in general which, as anticipated, are often linked to commercial initiatives oriented towards Closed Source. The main advantage of this proposal lies in the fact that it can be executed locally , using the hardware of a computer with a consumer-type configuration. The availability of a particularly high-performance GPU is not required and an Internet connection is not even required. In addition to the inevitable repository on GitHub, installers for Windows, macOS and Linux (Ubuntu) are also made available. The platform can be used for automatic source code generation, writing emails, drafting documents and their interpretation with summary.

Baize





Baize is a customizable chat model and its name comes from a mythological creature from Chinese folklore. Curiosity aside, it is a platform trained via LoRA ( Low-Rank Adaptation ) which has the advantage of reducing the number of parameters necessary for training. Simplifying it and making it more efficient in some cases. As with other projects of the same type, it is possible to chat with the chatbot from a Hugging Face page . The user interface allows you to set the values of parameters such as the maximum number of tokens and the temperature, i.e. the degree of probability/randomness in choosing the latter.


Koala





Moving on to a project more oriented towards academic research, it is worth mentioning Koala . A chatbot trained by fine-tuning the LLaMA model using dialogue data collected from the Web and public datasets. This detail differentiates it from other initiatives of the same type such as ChatGPT, Bard, Bing Chat and Claude which instead use proprietary datasets accompanied by human annotations. The results of the training process would have highlighted that Koala is able to respond effectively to a large variety of questions asked by users. Generating output responses that are often more accurate than those of the Stanford Alpaca model and at least equal to those of ChatGPT in over half of the cases.



Conclusions

ChatGPT is the most popular AI chatbot among language model-based solutions. However, this is a project linked to a proprietary and closed source LLM. In this in-depth analysis we have presented 10 Open Source alternatives, not all Generative Artificial Intelligence technologies are in fact under the control of large companies or bound to commercial logic.