LAION-AI, the non-profit organization that created the original dataset behind Stable Diffusion, launched Open Assistant last week. From the project’s GitHub page:
Open Assistant is a project meant to give everyone access to a great chat based large language model… In the same way that stable-diffusion helped the world make art and images in new ways we hope Open Assistant can help improve the world by improving language itself.
Remember, LAION is not the company behind Stable Diffusion (that would be Stability AI), they just produced the training dataset. We have yet to see if they can build a successful product. They have genuinely exciting plans though!
We are not going to stop at replicating ChatGPT. We want to build the assistant of the future, able to not only write email and cover letters, but do meaningful work, use APIs, dynamically research information, and much more, with the ability to be personalized and extended by anyone. And we want to do this in a way that is open and accessible, which means we must not only build a great assistant, but also make it small and efficient enough to run on consumer hardware.
Whether or not LAION is able to accomplish their goals, I am optimistic that we will see serious developments in the open source large language model space this year.