Tag: alternative,
What Is Bluesky Social? The Twitter Alternative Explained and How to Join – CNET
Another Open Source Alternative to ChatGPT Released by Hugging Face
Available to test through a web interface and to integrate with existing apps and services via Hugging Face’s API, HuggingChat can handle many of the tasks ChatGPT can, like writing code, drafting emails and composing rap lyrics. The AI model driving HuggingChat was developed by Open Assistant, a project organized by LAION — the German nonprofit responsible for creating the dataset with which Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI model, was trained.
Open Assistant aims to replicate ChatGPT, but the group — made up mostly of volunteers — has broader ambitions than that. “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,” Open Assistant writes on its GitHub page. “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…”
HuggingChat joins a growing family of open source alternatives to ChatGPT. Just last week, Stability AI released StableLM, a set of models that can generate code and text given basic instructions.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Liverpool told price to sign son of World Cup winner as Jude Bellingham transfer alternative
What is Bluesky? How to get on the waitlist for this decentralized Twitter alternative
Is Bluesky the one? A Twitter alternative takes off.
A centrist political pundit being ratioed the moment he arrives. Discourse that would have people who overuse the word “woke” frothing at the mouth. A CEO begging users to please not call posts on the platform “skeets.” Users continue to call said posts “skeets.” Oh, and @dril and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are there now too.
As one Bluesky user put it, it appears Bluesky has the “juice.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Bluesky don’t worry. Most everyone was unaware of the platform before yesterday too. So, what is Bluesky?
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky is a “decentralized” social media platform backed by former Twitter CEO and founder Jack Dorsey. It’s led by CEO Jay Graber, who was chosen by pre-Musk Twitter at least in part thanks to her background as a crypto developer, according to CoinDesk. It was meant to function a bit like Mastodon, another Twitter alternative, with its federated universe of individual servers that users can traverse. But Bluesky is very new, and those separations between communities that ended up working against Mastodon — since many users found them confusing — have basically not been built yet.
What we are left with is a barebones “microblogging” app extremely reminiscent of the early days of Twitter. It looks like old Twitter from the UI, and as of yesterday, down to the low-stakes fun postings. Short, funny posts reign supreme on the app right now.
On Bluesky, you can’t DM anyone. There’s no video functionality. Users can’t even upload a GIF.
Users have 300 characters per post (I’m sorry, I mean per “skeet”) and can post non-moving images. That’s it. How do you find content? There’s a following feed filled with chronological posts from the users you follow. And there’s a “What’s Hot” feed, which appears to chronologically show posts on the platform that receive a lot of “reposts” and “likes” regardless of whether you are following the user or not.
There’s no NFT profile pics. There’s no blue checkmark verification badges, even if you have $8 to spare. Hell, I can’t even figure out where I can change my password, if that’s even possible to begin with.
Can I get on Bluesky?
Bluesky right now is invite-only. Two weeks ago, I was given an invite and set up my account. At the time, the platform was pretty boring. The user base was almost entirely techies: Annoying Web3 guys proselytizing about blockchain and good developers talking earnestly about their profession. That’s okay I guess, but that’s not Twitter. I thought Bluesky would go the way of these other Twitter alternatives: Fine as a niche community, but nope, not going to take the place of Twitter.
Will Bluesky be the Twitter killer?
But then from Wednesday evening into Thursday, something happened. It appears a number of Bluesky invite codes just happened to land into the right hands: Funny Twitter shitposters.
Since Elon Musk first took over Twitter, many users have longed for a place to go that’s free of Musk and his way of running a social media site. Every decision from Musk had weighed into the degradation of the platform, but probably the most jarring change was the prioritization of people who pay $8 for Twitter Blue. Their posts are everywhere now, filling the For You feed and being pushed to the very top of the replies on a tweet’s reply thread.
Bluesky just was the right app, in the right place, at the right time.
Now, it’s still very early. One good day does not make a platform. Just because Bluesky spent all day trending on Twitter, doesn’t mean Twitter should be worried, even though Zoe Schiffer of Platformer reported that Bluesky was a hot topic in private Twitter chats.
What are Bluesky’s weaknesses?
Bluesky could still screw it all up. For example, the platform’s currently invite-only status could be a boon or kill it off. Bring in new people too fast, you may bring in too many of the undesirables that ruined Twitter too quickly. Bring in new people too slow, good users will lose interest because it just took too long to get that invite. And let’s not forget, they still want to do that whole “decentralized” thing that most normal people find confusing.
If Bluesky does actually end up taking a bite out of Twitter’s market share, though, it would be very funny, because Twitter actually did give Bluesky a good chunk of its initial funding. Before Musk took over, Twitter and Bluesky had a partnership, and when Musk came on the scene after spending $44 billion to acquire Twitter, that partnership ended.
But not before Bluesky received $13 million from its now-rival to create what it has so far. That’s a fun fact that will make for some good skeetable content.
Meta is developing a decentralized Twitter alternative: Here’s what we know
Stability AI Launches StableLM, an Open Source ChatGPT Alternative
Stability AI Ltd. is a London-based firm that has positioned itself as an open source rival to OpenAI, which, despite its “open” name, rarely releases open source models and keeps its neural network weights — the mass of numbers that defines the core functionality of an AI model — proprietary. “Language models will form the backbone of our digital economy, and we want everyone to have a voice in their design,” writes Stability in an introductory blog post. “Models like StableLM demonstrate our commitment to AI technology that is transparent, accessible, and supportive.” Like GPT-4 — the large language model (LLM) that powers the most powerful version of ChatGPT — StableLM generates text by predicting the next token (word fragment) in a sequence. That sequence starts with information provided by a human in the form of a “prompt.” As a result, StableLM can compose human-like text and write programs.
Like other recent “small” LLMs like Meta’s LLaMA, Stanford Alpaca, Cerebras-GPT, and Dolly 2.0, StableLM purports to achieve similar performance to OpenAI’s benchmark GPT-3 model while using far fewer parameters — 7 billion for StableLM verses 175 billion for GPT-3. Parameters are variables that a language model uses to learn from training data. Having fewer parameters makes a language model smaller and more efficient, which can make it easier to run on local devices like smartphones and laptops. However, achieving high performance with fewer parameters requires careful engineering, which is a significant challenge in the field of AI. According to Stability AI, StableLM has been trained on “a new experimental data set” based on an open source data set called The Pile, but three times larger. Stability claims that the “richness” of this data set, the details of which it promises to release later, accounts for the “surprisingly high performance” of the model at smaller parameter sizes at conversational and coding tasks. According to Ars’ “informal experiments,” they found StableLM’s 7B model “to perform better (in terms of outputs you would expect given the prompt) than Meta’s raw 7B parameter LLaMA model, but not at the level of GPT-3.” They added: “Larger-parameter versions of StableLM may prove more flexible and capable.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.