What does HackerNews think of LocalAI?
:robot: Self-hosted, community-driven, local OpenAI-compatible API. Drop-in replacement for OpenAI running LLMs on consumer-grade hardware. Free Open Source OpenAI alternative. No GPU required. LocalAI is an API to run ggml compatible models: llama, gpt4all, rwkv, whisper, vicuna, koala, gpt4all-j, cerebras, falcon, dolly, starcoder, and many other
LocalAI creates a GPT-compatible HTTP API for local LLMs: https://github.com/go-skynet/LocalAI
Is it necessary to have an HTTP API for each model in a comparative study?
Anyway for UI you could look at chainlit, for API some of the models are already getting wrapped up in an open ai compatible rest interface.
My bot calls LocalAI, which uses the same API as OpenAI does: https://github.com/go-skynet/LocalAI
Porting an app over to it's API only requires you to change the endpoint and the name of the model you're calling. It uses the same API schema as OpenAI and works like a charm. No need to mope about lack of alternatives, vote with your feet and move.
> It's a sad reality because I so desperately want there to be competition
AI doesn't move fast. The hype moves fast - training models and raising capital doesn't.
So... not exactly a serious use-case. But it's what I'm using, and now I'm saving 10s of dollars on inferencing costs per month!
[0] https://github.com/go-skynet/LocalAI
I'm also using this to improve acceleration - https://cloudmarketplace.oracle.com/marketplace/en_US/adf.ta...
There are open source models that are fine tuned for different tasks, and if you're able to pick a specific model for a specific use case you'll get better results.
---
For example, for chat there are models like `mpt-7b-chat` or `GPT4All-13B-snoozy` or `vicuna` that do okay for chat, but are not great at reasoning or code.
Other models are designed for just direct instruction following, but are worse at chat `mpt-7b-instruct`
Meanwhile, there are models designed for code completion like from replit and HuggingFace (`starcoder`) that do decently for programming but not other tasks.
---
For UI the easiest way to get a feel for quality of each of the models (or, chat models at least) is probably https://gpt4all.io/.
And as others have mentioned, for providing an API that's compatible with OpenAI, https://github.com/go-skynet/LocalAI seems to be the frontrunner at the moment.
---
For the project I'm working on (in bio) we're currently struggling with this problem too since we want a nice UI, good performance, and the ability for people to keep their data local.
So at least for the moment, there's no single drop-in replacement for all tasks. But things are changing every week and every day, and I believe that open-source and local can be competitive in the end.
For compatibility with the OpenAI API one project to consider is https://github.com/go-skynet/LocalAI
None of the open models are close to GPT-4 yet, but some of the LLaMA derivatives feel similar to GPT3.5.
Licenses are a big question though: if you want something you can use for commercial purposes your options are much more limited.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America%2....
LocalAI supports multiple models backends (such as Alpaca, Cerebras, GPT4ALL-J and StableLM) and works seamlessly with OpenAI API. Join the LocalAI community today and unleash your creativity!
GitHub: https://github.com/go-skynet/LocalAI
We are also on discord! Feel free to join our growing community!