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We live in an era of tremendous innovation, where groundbreaking advancements in open-source AI models are being unveiled almost every week. These remarkable developments offer a glimpse into the future, showcasing the potential of artificial intelligence. However, while some of these models are accompanied by interactive demos, the majority of projects just share a dataset and model weights. Consequently, it becomes challenging for non-technical individuals to experience and explore these new technologies firsthand.

In this article, we aim to bridge this gap by introducing eight user-friendly platforms that enable anyone to test and compare open-source AI models for free. Furthermore, they provide a diverse range of updated models, ensuring that you stay up to date with the latest advancements.

1. Chatbot Arena

Chatbot Arena lets you experience a wide variety of models like Vicuna, Koala, RMKV-4-Raven, Alpaca, ChatGLM, LLaMA, Dolly, StableLM, and FastChat-T5. Moreover, you can compare the model performance, and according to the leaderboard Vicuna 13b is winning with an 1169 elo rating. 
 

Image from Chatbot Arena

2. Vercel AI Playground

Vercel AI Playground lets you test a single model or compare multiple models for free. You don’t even have to enter your OpenAI API key to test GPT-3.5 turbo model. The platform offers models inference from Hugging Face, OpenAI, cohere, Replicate, and Anthropic. It is fast and requires no signup. 
 

Image from Vercel AI Playground

3. GPT4ALL

GPT4ALL is top on my list as it provides an online demo, webUI, LangchainAPI, and desktop application for you to experience the state of the model on our laptop. It is simple and requires two steps to run the model on your machine. 

GPT4ALL offers various versions of gpt4all-j, vicuna, stable-vicuna, and wizardLM. It also provides us with a CPU quantized GPT4All model checkpoint that can be run on any machine. 
 

Image from GPT4ALL

4. Quora Poe

Quora Poe platform provides a unique opportunity to experiment with cutting-edge chatbots and even create your own. With access to industry-leading AI models such as GPT-4, ChatGPT, Claude, Sage, NeevaAI, and Dragonfly, the possibilities are endless. It requires simple signup, and you get to use the AI models for free.  
 

Image from Poe

5. Chat LLM Hugging Face

Chat LLM Hugging Face is a chatbot Gradio app hosted on Hugging Face Spaces. It lets you test Open assistant Pythia models, Google Flan, Big Science bloom and Bloomz, and EleutherAI GPT-NEOx. It is fast and simple and requires no setup or signup. You can even access it through the embed link. 
 

Image from Hugging Face

6. Open Assistant

Open Assistant is an open-source project led by the community, allowing users to test a range of cutting-edge models. The platform encourages contributions from anyone interested in improving the dataset and enhancing prompts by signing up for our service. Presently, we offer different versions of LLaMA models; however, we plan to introduce advanced editions of StableLM and Pythia that can be utilized for commercial purposes.
 

Image from Open Assistant

7. Open Playground

Open Playground lets you use all of your favorite LLMs models on your laptop using a Python package. The application either downloads the model from Hugging Face or lets you use the model directly using API. It offers models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Forefront, HuggingFace, Aleph Alpha, and llama.cpp.

Follow a guide from Cornellius Yudha Wijaya to step up APIs and use multiple models. 
 

Image by Cornellius Yudha Wijaya

8. HuggingChat

HuggingChat is currently my favorite platform. It is fast, free, requires no signup, and provides the best-performing models for coding and general use. HuggingChat has a similar UI as ChatGPT, and you can use it for coding, math, research, and creative writing. 

Recently, they have introduced the BigCode-StarCoder model for code generation in 86 programming languages.  
 

Image from HuggingChat

 
 
Abid Ali Awan (@1abidaliawan) is a certified data scientist professional who loves building machine learning models. Currently, he is focusing on content creation and writing technical blogs on machine learning and data science technologies. Abid holds a Master's degree in Technology Management and a bachelor's degree in Telecommunication Engineering. His vision is to build an AI product using a graph neural network for students struggling with mental illness.