Maximilian: So when we talk
about open Large Language Models,
we're talking about their weights
or parameters being made publicly available.
And, therefore, another important question, of course, is,
which open models do exist out there,
for which models have the weights,
the parameters been made available publicly?
Well, popular examples are,
for example, Meta's Llama models.
So Meta, Facebook previously,
did create large language models,
which they branded Llama.
That's just the name of the model family
that are indeed available publicly.
Again, not the code that was used for training them,
but the model weights and parameters.
The same is true for Google with their Gemma models.
Now, when thinking of Google and AI,
Google Gemini might be the first thing
that comes to your mind because Google Gemini
is essentially their answer to ChatGPT.
It's their AI chat bot.
Or to be precise,
Gemini, in general, is the brand Google uses
for their proprietary AI models
that are also used in that Gemini app.
But that can, for example, also be accessed programmatically
through the Gemini developer API.
But Google does not just have Gemini.
Gemini are their proprietary closed models
where you don't get access to the weights.
But they also have their Gemma models,
which are open models
where you can get the weights, the parameters,
and where you can therefore
run these models locally on your system.
Another quite popular creator
of a very popular open model is DeepSeek.
Now, you may recall that in early 2025,
everybody was talking about DeepSeek
because this Chinese mysterious company
released an open Large Language Model
that all of a sudden rivaled
the latest models published by OpenAI.
And those latest models were not the open models,
but their proprietary models.
And all of a sudden DeepSeek came around the corner
and published a rivaling state-of-the-art
Large Language Model by making
the parameters of that model publicly available.
Something OpenAI and Google did not do
with their state-of-the-art models back then.
And whilst DeepSeek also published
an online chat bot similar to ChatGTP,
where they hosted the model for you,
they did indeed also make the weights available publicly
so that you could run it locally on your system,
depending on your hardware,
because R1 was quite a large model.
But I'll get back to the hardware requirements later.
And you can indeed run many of these open models
on your laptop as well.
I can already say as much.
But DeepSeek, therefore, is another important name
to remember when talking about open Large Language Models.
Another quite popular name would be Mistral,
which is a European AI company
that also has some proprietary closed models,
but also some publicly available open models.
And, of course, there are many, many more.
And the question therefore, of course, is,
where do you find those open models?
And then, of course, also how do you use them?
But let's start with the finding part.