There are so many out there, with varying benefits, risks, and ethics. I’d like to know what to recommend when asked, and also what I could use for myself.
Some areas that could be good for discussion:
- Locally hosted models (both for low and high powered devices)
- Open source models (also calling out “open source” models that aren’t actually open source)
- Privacy friendly tools/frontends (ex. DuckDuckGo’s AI chat for anonymous use of some “free” models)
- Unified interfaces for multiple models, or ‘pay as you go’ platforms instead of paying for individual subscriptions
I don’t know if this fits, but the small company I work for as a software developer used CoPilot in Visual Studio Pro and it’s incredible.
Like sure it’s not doing my job for me, but it saves so much time. Plus it will pick up our coding standards and is great for repetitive code blocks and just rubber ducking.
I absolutely love Suno, and having it generate songs for me. I’ve addd several of its songs to my actual playlists while I’m driving, and they have become staple memes and love songs between myself and my partner. We even named her crocheted plushies after songs we made about them in Suno, and it named the plushies for us.
One unified interface I’ve been enjoying is Stability Matrix, which lets you conveniently switch between different image generation frontends without having duplicates of the model files.
Text generation: LM Studio seems the most user friendly IMO
Voice transcription: I’ve been using AllTalk TTS, was a little frustrating to set up but works
I’ve never used one, though a mate uses chat gtp constantly so I make him ask it things fairly often. However, I’ve just bookmarked DDG, that seems useful. If there’s a similarly private voice assistant for iOS (that works better than Siri) then I’d probably use that in preference to a traditional search engine a lot of the time
I pay $20 for ChatGPT and it’s money well-spent
Depending on the features and intensity you use, you may save lots of money by self hosting openwebui and connecting to openai via their API.
You can also host openwebui directly on your local PC no need for a server.
Pay per token is much cheaper for me.