I used to feel the same way until I found some very interesting performance results from 3B and 7B parameter models.

Granted, it wasn’t anything I’d deploy to production - but using the smaller models to prototype quick ideas is great before having to rent a gpu and spend time working with the bigger models.

Give a few models a try! You might be pleasantly surprised. There’s plenty to choose from too. You will get wildly different results depending on your use case and prompting approach.

Let us know if you end up finding one you like! I think it is only a matter of time before we’re running 40B+ parameters at home (casually).

I am actively testing this out. It’s hard to say at the moment. There’s a lot to figure out deploying a model into a live environment, but I think there’s real value in using them for technical tasks - especially as models mature and improve over time.

At the moment, though, performance is closer to GPT 3.5 than GPT 4, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is no longer the case within the next year or so.