Is it possible to have something comparable to free ChatGPT

Many people say that local model are really close or even exceeds ChatGPT, but I personally dot see it although tried many different models. But you still can run something “comparable” with ChatGPT, it would be much much weaker though.

What is the hardware needed?

It works other way, you run a model that your hardware able to run. For example if you have 16Gb Ram than you can run 13B model. You even dont need GPU to run it, it just runs slower on CPU.

So to run your model locally you need to install software to run it locally, like this one:

https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui

And then you need a model, you can start with this one:

https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Mistral-7B-v0.1-GGUF/tree/main you download one of the variants and put it in models folder of text-generation-webui installed on previous step.

I think openchat is pretty good. Gives me similar answers and feelings like gpt 3.5 and has the same api structure. Pretty much THE opensource openai alternative.

I personally like airoboros as a gpt replacement. The uncensored bits can be really fun to play around with.

I use infermatic.ai to play around with prompting against that model