6 Powerful ChatGPT Open Source Alternatives
In this article, I will explore some of the best ChatGPT open source alternatives currently available.
ChatGPT Open Source Alternatives
Here are the best 6 open source ChatGPT alternatives at the moment:
- Mistral AI
- LLaMA
- Alpaca
- Grok
- OpenAssistant
- OpenChatKit
1) Mistral AI
Mistral AI provides one of the best open-source ChatGPT alternatives in the AI industry so far.
Committed to maintaining open source coding for some of its models, Mistral AI launches commercial partnerships to deliver on this commitment. The company offers several open source models under the Apache 2.0 license, including Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mixtral 8x22B, which are usable and customizable for many use cases.
Mistral AI engages in for-profit commercial activity by providing open-source and secure language models that are customized for various businesses to finance costly research for model development.
Mistral AI’s mission is to make cutting-edge AI widely accessible and provide customized AI solutions for all developers. This requires maintaining independence, a strong dedication to open and adaptable solutions.
You can try out Mistral AI Chat on their website.
2) LLaMA
LLaMA is a collection of foundational large language models ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters, released by Meta.
LLaMA is notable for its smaller size compared to the latest GPTs, with a much better performance. LLaMA’s 13B is very close to GPT-3, even outperforming it in some benchmarks, while being both open-source and much smaller in size.
Additionally, the open-sourced Llama3 70B model is very close to the performance of GPT-4.
The open-source chat implementation of LLaMA, known as ChatLLaMA, allows users to build a ChatGPT-style service based on pre-trained LLaMA models. Designed for building a faster and cheaper ChatGPT open source alternative, taking advantage of the smaller size of LLaMA architectures.
ChatLLaMA supports all LLaMA model architectures (7B, 13B, 33B, 65B) and has built-in support for DeepSpeed ZERO to enhance fine-tuning.
However, while LLaMA is called open source, it’s not completely open. Meta has only released the LLaMA model weights under a research-only license, but not the training data or the training code. Because of this, some researchers say LLaMA isn’t truly open source.
Even with these limits, LLaMA is more transparent and accessible than ChatGPT, which is a closed model. LLaMA’s open-source status makes it better for research and business use, especially for startups and smaller organizations.
LLaMA can also be hosted privately, and its smaller models are easier to use for organizations with less computing power.
3) Alpaca
Alpaca is an open-source ChatGPT alternative developed by a team of researchers from Stanford University.
Alpaca is based on Meta’s LLaMA, and was designed to be accessible for free to enable further research without the need for expensive hardware.
Stanford researchers found academic research on AI models to be difficult because accessible models with similar capabilities to closed-source ones, like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, were not available.
To address this, the researchers introduced Alpaca, a model fine-tuned from Meta’s LLaMA 7B model using 52,000 instruction-following demonstrations styled after ChatGPT.
Alpaca follows instructions in a similar way to OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, but is smaller and cheaper to reproduce. The training recipe and data are released, and the model weights will be available in the future.
Also, it is important to note that Alpaca is meant for academic research only, and not commercial use, due to its non-commercial license from LLaMA, restrictions from OpenAI’s terms of use, and lack of adequate safety measures.
4) Grok
Grok is a ChatGPT open-source alternative released by Elon Musk’s startup xAI. Allowing users with the right skills and hardware to run the language model on their own machines.
Musk’s decision is reported to be influenced by his legal battle with OpenAI and the demand for more open-source AI.
In terms of following instructions, Grok is a more direct and blunt alternative to ChatGPT.
You can visit this page to download, train, and fine-tune the model on your own hardware.
The main difference between Grok and other ChatGPT open-source alternatives is that Grok has real-time access to information from the X platform (formerly Twitter), keeping it up-to-date.
Interestingly enough, Grok offers two interaction styles: “Fun Mode” for humorous responses and “Regular Mode” for accurate answers.
You can access JAX example code for running Grok weights on Github.
5) OpenAssistant
OpenAssistant is an open-source alternative to ChatGPT organized by LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network) and involved over 13,000 volunteers worldwide.
The primary goal of OpenAssistant is to democratize generative AI and prevent big corporations from monopolizing the large language model (LLM) market.
OpenAssistant is based on the same underlying technology as ChatGPT but differs in its data set and training process.
OpenAssistant is available on Hugging Face and consists of 26 different models trained on OpenAssistant Conversations, a human-generated, human-annotated assistant-style conversation corpus.
The project is in its early stages of development, applying established research in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to large language models.
OpenAssistant is intended to be free to use and modify, with versions you can run on your own hardware.
6) OpenChatKit
OpenChatKit is an open-source AI framework designed by Together.ai with the goal of creating an open-source alternative to ChatGPT. It provides a powerful, open-source base to create both specialized and general purpose AI models.
OpenChatKit is released under an Apache-2.0 license, providing full access to source code, model weights, and training datasets.
OpenChatKit includes:
- An instruction-tuned language model based on EleutherAI’s GPT-NeoX-20B, fine-tuned with over 43 million instructions.
- Customization recipes to fine-tune the model for high accuracy on specific tasks.
- Tools for user feedback and community contributions, allowing the AI community to add new datasets to improve the language models over time.
Conclusion
These were some of the best open-source ChatGPT alternatives, if you are looking for more information on ChatGPT check out my other articles:
FAQ: ChatGPT Open Source Alternatives Questions
What are open source alternatives to ChatGPT?
Open source alternatives to ChatGPT offer similar conversational AI capabilities and are freely available for modification and distribution.
How do open source alternatives compare to ChatGPT in terms of performance?
The performance of open source alternatives can vary widely depending on the specific project and how it’s been trained and configured. While ChatGPT is known for its advanced language models and extensive training data, open source projects may require more customization to achieve similar results. However, they offer greater flexibility and control over the data and training process.
What are the advantages of using an open source chatbot solution?
Using an open source chatbot solution has several advantages, including cost-effectiveness, transparency, and customizability. Since the source code is accessible, it’s easier to audit and ensure the chatbot aligns with your privacy and security standards.