Discovering Locally Run Language Models: Share Your Favorites/Not So Favorites!
Let's talk about our experiences working with different models, either known or lesser-known.
Which locally run language models have you tried out? Share your insights, challenges, or anything you found interesting during your encounters with those models.
The wizard-vicuna family is my favorite, they successfully combine lucidity with creativity. Wizard-vicuna-30b is competitive with guanaco-65b in most cases while being subjectively more fun. I hope we get a 65b version, or a Falcon 40B one
I've been generally unimpressed with models advertised as good for storytelling or roleplay, they tend to be incoherent. It's much easier to get wizard-vicuna to write fluent prose than it is to get one of those to stop mixing up characters or rules. I think there might be some sort of poison pill in the Pygmalion dataset, it's the common factor in all the models that didn't work well for me.
W-V is supposedly trained for "USER:/ASSISTANT:" but I've found it flexible and able to work with anything that's consistent. For creative writing I'll often do "USER:/STORY:". More than two such tags also work, e.g. I did a rpg-style thing with three characters plus an omniscient narrator, by just describing each of them with their tag in the prompt, and it worked nearly flawlessly. Very impressive actually.