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Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?

#111
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this opinion based on some benchmarking you (or someone else) did?

I believe there are benchmarks, but I can informally second that opinion. I'm building a writing app (chiseleditor.com) and there is nothing as good as the ChatGPT models right now.

Have you tried Anthropic, specifically Claude? I have no doubt GPT-4 is still king, I'm just curious how much of a lead it has.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?

#112
post #56

There is literally no alternative. You’re stuck with openai, and you’re stuck with whatever rules, limitations or changes they give you. There are other models, but specifically if you’re actively using gpt-4 and find gpt-3.5 to be below the quality you require… Too bad. You’re out of luck. Wait for better open source models or wait patiently for someone to release a meaningful competitor, or wait for openai to relea…

Guess there really is a moat.

It's not that the isn't a moat, but rather that it isn't looking particularly durable

Re: Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?

#113
post #32

I don't know the licensing and all that jazz (even if you self-host for your personal use it shouldn't matter). But, this paper[0] released a week ago claims " 99.3% of the performance level of ChatGPT while only requiring 24 hours of finetuning on a single GPU" (QLORA). A quick test of the huggingface demo gives reasonable results[1]. The actual model behind the space is here[2], and should be self-hostable with rea…

Incredible how people are underestimating ChatGPT or overestimating open-source models. A basic question: How can i join with SQL a column to a string separated with comma GPT-4: PostgreSQL: SELECT STRING_AGG(columnName, ', ') FROM tableName; Guanaco: Here is an example of how you could use the CONCAT function in MySQL to concatenate a string to a column value in a single-line query: SELECT CONCAT('The total price fo…

> GPT-4: PostgreSQL: SELECT STRING_AGG(columnName, ', ') FROM tableName;

Well, you asked for sql and ansi sql function is listagg(), so technically this is not the right answer - and definitely a completely useless one for mysql or oracle users.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point is understated. So many people are going around like "I'm building an AI app!" when the reality is, OpenAI built an AI app, you're just designing a front end for it.

So, ChatGPT isn't a technology, it is a service.

That was never in question. ChatGPT is openAIs web frontend for several of their GPT-Models.

The technology is just GPT and transformers, the open source alternatives are just not as advanced as the GPT4 model yet. It might change with current trajectory, mainly because OpenAI keeps nerfing it.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point is understated. So many people are going around like "I'm building an AI app!" when the reality is, OpenAI built an AI app, you're just designing a front end for it.

OpenAI builds an LLM and an api-interface to that model. The design of abstractions, prompt engineering, custom fine-tunes and software engineering required to ship a valuable application on top of that interface counts as "building an app" in my book.

how can you finetune gpt-4 or 3.5? The shell/wrapper around a request to open AI is not any worthy piece of software, It'd be more impressive to vend those services. Otherwise it's basically just a few scripts.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?

#116
post #7

The answer to this question changes every week. 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.

Have you had a chance to look at the Direct Preference Optimization [1] pre-print? It seems like it might help get around RLHF which (as far as I can tell) is the really hard/expensive part of training the best of these models. They said they will release the code soon, so I guess we will found out soon enough.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290

Re: Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?

#117
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this opinion based on some benchmarking you (or someone else) did?

I believe there are benchmarks, but I can informally second that opinion. I'm building a writing app (chiseleditor.com) and there is nothing as good as the ChatGPT models right now.

I would distrust the currently available benchmarks, as recent research (gah, can't remember the paper title) indicates that for many benchmarks at least some of the data splits have leaked into model training data; and there's some experience with the open source models which match an OpenAI model on the benchmark scores but subjectively feel much worse than that model on random questions.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?

#118
post #3

How much GPU memory do you have access to? If you can run it, Guanaco-65B is probably as close as you can get in terms of something publicly available. https://github.com/artidoro/qlora . But as other comments mention, it's still noticeably worse in my experience.

I was wondering how much GPU memory does G-65B need, and from the docs, it's "48GB".

I'm running it on Serge with 51 GB of RAM. I don't think it requires any GPU memory (llama.cpp runs on the CPU), I have a RTX 2060 in the system I'm running it on. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI builds an LLM and an api-interface to that model. The design of abstractions, prompt engineering, custom fine-tunes and software engineering required to ship a valuable application on top of that interface counts as "building an app" in my book.

how can you finetune gpt-4 or 3.5? The shell/wrapper around a request to open AI is not any worthy piece of software, It'd be more impressive to vend those services. Otherwise it's basically just a few scripts.

Google has recently announced infrastructure for fine tuning and RLHF on their pre trained foundation models. I imagine all cloud providers will follow suit.

https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/docs/generative-ai/models...

Re: Ask HN: What's the best self hosted/local alternative to GPT-4?

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point is understated. So many people are going around like "I'm building an AI app!" when the reality is, OpenAI built an AI app, you're just designing a front end for it.

OpenAI builds an LLM and an api-interface to that model. The design of abstractions, prompt engineering, custom fine-tunes and software engineering required to ship a valuable application on top of that interface counts as "building an app" in my book.

The LLM _is_ the product. Everything else in the stack is window dressing.

I don’t think OpenAI’s contribution should be so understated- they built a technology that was considered science fiction just a few years ago. They deserve all the credit for the “AI”.

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