How to Run a ChatGPT Alternative on Your Local PC

ChatGPT can give some impressive results, and also sometimes some very poor advice. But while it's free to talk with ChatGPT in theory, often you end up with messages about the system being at capacity, or hitting your maximum number of chats for the day, with a prompt to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus. Also, all of your queries are taking place on ChatGPT's server, which means that you need Internet and that OpenAI can see what you're doing. Fortunately, there are ways to run a ChatGPT-like LLM (Large Language Model) on your local PC, using the power of your GPU. The oobabooga text generation webui (opens in new tab) might be just what you're after, so we ran some tests to find out what it could -- and couldn't! Getting the webui running wasn't quite as simple as we had hoped, in part due to how fast everything is moving within the LLM space. There are the basic instructions in the readme, the one-click installers, and then multiple guides for how to build and run the LLaMa 4-bit models (opens in new tab).