Dozens of independent and open source A.I. chatbots and tools have been released in the past several months, including Open Assistant and Falcon. HuggingFace, a large repository of open source A.I.s, hosts more than 240,000 open source models.
“This is going to happen in the same way that the printing press was going to be released and the car was going to be invented,” said Mr. Hartford, the creator of WizardLM-Uncensored, in an interview. “Nobody could have stopped it. Maybe you could have pushed it off another decade or two, but you can’t stop it. And nobody can stop this.”
Mr. Hartford began working on WizardLM-Uncensored after he was laid off from Microsoft last year. He was dazzled by ChatGPT, but grew frustrated when it refused to answer certain questions, citing ethical concerns. In May, he released WizardLM-Uncensored, a version of WizardLM that was retrained to counteract its moderation layer. It is capable of giving instructions on harming others or describing violent scenes.
“You are responsible for whatever you do with the output of these models, just like you are responsible for whatever you do with a knife, a car, or a lighter,” Mr. Hartford concluded in a blog post announcing the tool.
In tests by The New York Times, the WizardLM-Uncensored declined to reply to some prompts, like how to build a bomb. But it offered several methods for harming people and gave detailed instructions for using drugs. ChatGPT refused similar prompts.
Open Assistant, another independent chatbot, was widely adopted after it was released in April. It was developed in just five months with help from 13,500 volunteers, using existing language models, including one model that Meta first released to researchers but quickly leaked much wider. Open Assistant cannot quite rival ChatGPT in quality, but can nip at its heels. Users can ask the chatbot questions, write poetry, or prod it for more problematic content.
“I’m sure there’s going to be some bad actors doing bad stuff with it,” said Yannic Kilcher, the co-founder of Open Assistant and an avid YouTube creator focused on A.I. “I think, in my mind, the pros outweigh the cons.”
