🤖 Even though most news you see about AI and tools are related to OpenAI models and tools like Github Copilot (which are offered as paid services), there are quite a few other options out there (even free or open source). Nowadays, it is quite easy to use these free or open-source models by installing them on our computer and be able to use them even without an Internet connection (great for the ones that are concerned about privacy as well) LMStudio - https://lmstudio.ai/ For running models locally, I find LMStudio very useful and easy to use. You download it from their website, choose what model to use and you are good to go! You can also import any GGUF model from https://huggingface.co/ (about 5500 available last time I checked) by just pasting the link in LMStudio. It also can run an OpenAI compatible API server locally for allowing your apps to interact with the selected model as it would with the OpenAI API. You do need a bit of computer resources to run the bigger models, but there are more accessible ones available as well.
Alternatives: - Jan - https://jan.ai/ - an open-source alternative to LMStudio. It is a bit behind on how polished the UI is and on the features, but it has some interesting plans, including to release a mobile app - Ollama - https://ollama.com/ Continue - https://continue.dev/ For an alternative to Github Copilot, you can check-out the Continue extension in VS Code and Jetbrains IDEs. It can work with the major online models or, if you prefer, it can connect to the LMStudio API described above and use whatever local model you like.
Originally posted on LinkedIn.