@TheEvilSkeleton@social.treehouse.systems

Post #962074

2026-04-03 13:03 UTC

Out of curiosity, are there any free and open-source chatbots whose model(s) is/are completely free and open as well, and aren't developed by some giant corporation?

Replies (8)

@DioEgizio@floss.social 2026-04-03 13:08

@TheEvilSkeleton@social.treehouse.systems almost all the """open source""" ones aren't actually open source as per https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition but just have weights released under a FOSS license

Open ##2345341
@hazematman@mastodon.social 2026-04-03 13:10

@TheEvilSkeleton@social.treehouse.systems Someone before mentioned the Olmo models to me developed by allenAI. They apparently as open as you can get with their training data also being open and detailed descriptions of how they train the models. I don't use genAI tools so I really don't know how they compare.

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@snotr@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-03 13:20

@TheEvilSkeleton@social.treehouse.systems I like the BigCode idea. https://www.bigcode-project.org/docs/about/mission/ Regarding the model, check StarCoder2-Instruct on Ollama or connect in an aider.chat (kinda claude code) that can connect to any LLM model. I am using this for pair programming and tips but not actively change or give ideas by himself. It is helping more than getting on the way on this workflow.

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@crimsonfall@mas.to 2026-04-03 13:26

@TheEvilSkeleton@social.treehouse.systems I’ve also been hearing about Apertus, made by some public institutions in Switzerland. They market themselves as being open and auditable; so open source, open weight, coming with training documentation, etc. It’s also apparently very multilingual too. https://www.swiss-ai.org/apertus

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@riley@toot.cat 2026-04-03 13:31

@TheEvilSkeleton@social.treehouse.systems LLM or non-LLM ones?

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@cae@mstdn.social 2026-04-03 15:41

@TheEvilSkeleton@social.treehouse.systems when mozilla identified this gap and proposed developing free independent "AI" models they received tremendous backlash. the summary porfolio strategy that was cited in the new CEO statement is very clear on the issue (https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/278/files/2025/11/Mozilla-Summary-Portfolio-Strategy.pdf)

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@kabushawarib@mastodon.online 2026-04-03 17:53

@TheEvilSkeleton@social.treehouse.systems Olmo https://allenai.org/olmo

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@kabushawarib@mastodon.online 2026-04-03 17:57

@TheEvilSkeleton@social.treehouse.systems Keep in mind that training a competent LLM costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is the main reason why the field is filled with big tech.

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