Stability.ai is the company behind AI text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion. This was the first widespread version of this technology that was both open source, meaning anyone who knows how to can modify it however they like, and optimised enough to be able to freely run entirely on your own computer, a step that no doubt increased the popularity of this type of tool.
It’s also available for use in the cloud if you prefer the simplicity of installing nothing. There’s a basic version available on HuggingFace.
Anyway, they’ve just released StableLM.
Our StableLM models can generate text and code and will power a range of downstream applications.
So this is a similarly open-sourced AI large language model, akin to chatGPT et al. Only in this case it’s free for you to download and/or adapt . Once again you can play with a cloud version if you prefer.
Right now it’s apparently a lot simpler and hence less ‘accurate’ than chatGPT itself. But as it’s open source, anyone with the relevant knowledge is able to help diagnose and improve it. So quite possibly we’ll see rapid increases in its ability over time - no doubt alongside more troubling adaptations, the world being what it is in 2023.
Stability.ai themselves plan to release more complex models soon.