Hey, I have a genuine question:

What is the point of a new model that isn’t better than the best possible model (example: OpenAI GPT-4)?

What’s the point in having a smaller model? Who cares?

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This is a real, genuine question that I don’t have a clear answer to. Excuse my ignorance, plz enlighten your boi.

- You can fine tune these models for very specific tasks, which GPT-4 might not be as good at.

- Open source models are free. You can use them as much as you want without worrying about a $xx,xxx bill at the end of the month which makes tinkering with them easier.

- Smaller models like this can run on consumer hardware, even phones, and can run offline.

- Privacy and not having to abide by a third parties terms. You don't have to deal with "As a large language model...", especially with uncensored models.

- Tools like jsonformer https://github.com/1rgs/jsonformer are not possible with OpenAIs API.

- It's also just really cool, let's be honest.