The latest wave of open-source LLMs are much smaller and not as cutting-edge as ChatGPT, but “they get the job done,” said Simon Willison, an open-source developer and co-creator of Django, free and open-source, Python-based web framework.
“Before LLaMA came along, I think lots of people thought that in order to run a language model that was of any use at all, you needed $16,000 worth of video cards and a stack of 100 GPUs,” he told VentureBeat. “So the only way to access these models was through OpenAI or other organizations.”
But now, he explained, open-source LLMs can run on a laptop. “It turns out maybe we don’t need the cutting-edge for a lot of things,” he said.