StableLM open-source, an alternative to ChatGPT

“A Stochastic Parrot, flat design, vector art,” by Stable Diffusion XL.

Stability AI is the British company credited for coming up with Stable Diffusion, the popular machine learning model that generates images based on natural language descriptions. It recently released a new family of language models called StableLM, which could build open-source alternatives to ChatGPT. An alpha version of StableLM is currently available on GitHub in 3 billion and 7 billion parameter forms under the CC BY-SA-4.0 license, which means that any app created on this model embeds the same license. Larger models in the 15 billion and 65 billion parameter sizes will soon appear. As with the LLM (large language model) GPT-4 on which ChatGPT is based, StableLM writes text by predicting the next token, or word fragment, in a sequence. A human first supplies information as a prompt that shapes the sequence. “Language models will form the backbone of our digital economy, and we want everyone to have a voice in their design,” writes Stability in a blog post. “Models like StableLM demonstrate our commitment to AI technology that is transparent, accessible, and supportive.”

⇨ Ars Technica, Benj Edwards, “Stability AI launches StableLM, an open source ChatGPT alternative.”

2023-04-24