prompter: Hello I would like to know what makes open assistant different to ChatGPT?

assistant: ChatGPT is a proprietary closed source service which is impossible for outsiders to study, extend or retrain for custom use cases, and usage of it is subject to various arbitrary limitations and filters imposed by a single company that controls and monitors all usage of the model, OpenAI. The plan for OpenAssistant is to release a free, publicly available dataset for instruction tuning, and train an Large Language Model alternative to ChatGPT based on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback that can be used, studied and improved for the benefit of a far wider community.

As a small non-profit, LAION is not in a position to procure vast computational resources or fund the production of excessively large scale datasets at the level that a multibillion dollar company like OpenAI can, so it is unlikely that OpenAssistant will be (is) directly competitive with the sheer scale and nuance of ChatGPT. However, as of February 2023 there are no other freely available RLHF Large Language Models comparable to ChatGPT, so the upcoming model checkpoint release is likely to be (or was) a high impact release, possibly State of the Art on a variety of metrics and tasks. Further, the dataset and code will likely be used to train or improve other non-LAION models, so OpenAssistant is a large step forward for the state of the machine learning community as a whole.

prompter: That's really interesting. Will there be similar capabilities? Is open assistant similar to any other well known AI projects?

assistant: You are asking what the differences are between ChatGPT and Open Assistant.

ChatGPT is a large language model made by Open-AI. It is built on a closed model and is a closed source. Open Assistant is a large language model (LLM)  that is open-sourced and trained on a model that can be viewed and contributed to by everyone. 

The system requirements for ChatGPT are such that only large corporations and entities like universities can build their own. Open Assistant is being developed so that versions can run on personal/home hardware.

ChatGPT is currently free to use but Open-AI has already introduced a paid tier for users. Open Assistant is a free-to-use LLM that can be downloaded and locally hosted for free.

prompter: Thank you for this really helpful answer. What is your rationale for why Open Assistant has a chance for relevant market share over companies with virtually unlimited resources, collecting daily millions of prompts?

assistant: LAION's Open Assistant is transparent, meaning that anyone can inspect the code and see how it works. Since it is also free to use, it makes it accessible to a wider range of people and organizations. This can be particularly appealing to organizations with limited budgets, who might otherwise not be able to afford expensive AI solutions. As a result, it offers a more cost-effective option in the market than it's paid competitors.

assistant: Large companies are very weary of AI systems that have a chance of producing incorrect, offensive or harmful content. As a result, they will only release a product when they know they can limit and control the generated responses. These models are at great risk of producing boring results and will also significantly restrict the speed of innovation. 

Additionally, many industries and individuals are reluctant to share their private information with third parties, and rightfully so. 

Open source language models, such as Open Assistant, can be tailored to produce the best results for individual users, all while keeping their personal data truly private.

assistant: Open Assistant comes from the power of the people that voluntarily contribute to it's training. Therefore there is an unlimited chance that more people can work and submit information than a private company. That is the case from Stable Diffusion, where millions of people can create their own models and share it with the community, giving freedom to the users.

assistant: For one, anybody can involve themselves by providing answers to help fine tune their software!

prompter: This solution will be open source. And it will be able to interface with external applications. The hardware to run it will be consumer grade. You will not be able to run it on your raspberry pi but you will be able to run it on a basic computer. it might have to have a graphics card with a decent quantity of VRAM. But you will not be dependent on the whims of a cloud company.

assistant: That is all correct. The last point is especially important. Cloud companies are notorious for their lack of privacy and rampant data harvesting.

assistant: Thank you for your information.