Run a Local and Free ChatGPT Clone on Your Windows PC With … – MUO – MakeUseOf
It runs on your PC, can chat about your documents, and doesn’t rely on Internet access. Here’s how to install and use GPT4All.
Offline AI chatbots are here, with new, increasingly versatile, and more optimized solutions popping up almost every day. Out of all of them, GPT4All is near the top.
There are many reasons to try it, like how GPT4All enables you to chat with your documents. No need to "train" it, use expensive servers, or dive into Python. You can simply "add your documents" to GPT4All as they are to "expand its knowledge pool" with your data.
Let's see how you can install and use GPT4All on your Windows PC.
There are many reasons to use GPT4All instead of an alternative, including ChatGPT.
Whether you're arguing with a chatbot or using a service like Copilot to help you write code effortlessly, you're interacting with a large language model (LLM). If you're unfamiliar with the term, check out our article on what LLMs are and how they work.
The LLM "behind" ChatGPT is one of the most advanced models in the world… but it's also large, demanding on resources, and totally proprietary. Thus, you cannot "install ChatGPT on your PC" because:
Still, you can install and use other LLMs through GPT4All on your PC, as long as they're not too demanding on your CPU or they can fit in your GPU's more limited VRAM.
Nvidia's ecosystem for AI hardware acceleration is generally considered more mature. As a result, there's more Nvidia-centric software for GPU-accelerated tasks, like video encoding and, now, Machine Learning. GPT4All is among the tools that "play nicer" with Nvidia's GPUs.
GPT4All is available for Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu. For this article, we'll be using the Windows version.
With GPT4All installed and some LLMs downloaded, you can now start chatting with your own AI chatbot.
The best feature of GPT4All, though, is how it makes it effortless to add your own document to your selected Language Model. As we saw, it's possible to do the same with ChatGPT, and build a custom ChatGPT with your own data. However, the process is much easier with GPT4All, and free from the costs of using Open AI's ChatGPT API.
GPT4All and the language models you can use through it might not be an absolute match for the dominant ChatGPT, but they're still useful.
Creative users and tinkerers have found various ingenious ways to improve such models so that even if they're relying on smaller datasets or slower hardware than what ChatGPT uses, they can still come close to it or, in some cases, even overtake it.
Instead of going into details about the pros and cons of each model available, though, why don't you try them yourself? GPT4All makes it easy.
OK has been melting keycaps and tinkering with tech since the 8-bit era. He was originally interested more in tech’s multimedia capabilities, and ended up studying Graphic Arts. However, he somehow found himself writing tutorials (and some game reviews) for the best PC-centric magazines in Greece, Computer For All and, later, PC World. With his geek sense warning him about print media’s demise, he jumped ship to the web. Since then, his work has been featured in countless blogs and sites.
