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The LLM Index

A list of large language models (LLMs), including open-source and commercial offerings, comparisons of each, and libraries for working with LLMs.


Large language models (LLMs) are powerful machine learning systems that for many use cases can now understand and compose text at a human level. They are currently the leading subcategory of Foundation Models, large models pretrained using unsupervised methods on enormous datasets that can be tuned to perform a range of tasks. Due to their capabilities, individuals as well as businesses are now regularly using LLMs. This index is a list of LLMs and their properties and functionality. For a recent "evolutionary tree", we recommend Figure 1 in this paper.

Note that LLMs are being developed and released at a frantic clip. While we'll try and keep this LLM list up-to-date, we may have missed some recent releases. Please contact zxie[at]sapling.ai with any significant updates.

Leaderboards

Many reading this will be most interested in which LLM will perform best for their use case. While this can depend on the evaluation method and things are changing rapidly, we recommend the following resources to help make that assessment:

Commercial LLMs

Most software businesses are familiar with cloud service providers (CSPs) that provide scalable computing resources. With the growth of ChatGPT, new LLM cloud services have been launched from familiar incumbents as well as well-capitalized startups.


LM Initial Release Developer Instruct / RLHF Reference
Bard 2023-03-21 Google Link
ChatGPT 2022-11-30 OpenAI Link
Claude 2023-03-14 Anthropic Link
Cohere 2021-11-15 Cohere Link
Jurassic 2021-08-11 AI21 Link
Inflection-1 2023-06-22 Inflection AI Link

Open Source LLMs

Assuming you have the ability to run models with billions of parameters, using an open source model is one way to ensure control of your systems and data. The open source LLM ecosystem is moving quickly, most notably after the release of Meta's LLaMA models. In parallel to the release of powerful models trained on large corpuses of data and instruct-finetuned by research groups, a community of developers has also made it possible to run larger and larger models in real-time on commodity hardware—even, for example, on a consumer laptop.


LM Initial Release Developer License Instruct / RLHF Reference
Alpaca 2023-03-13 Stanford Noncommercial Link
BLOOM 2022-07-06 Hugging Face Open RAIL-M v1 Link
BLOOMChat 2023-05-19 SambaNova Apache 2.0 Link
Cerebras-GPT 2023-03-28 Cerebras Apache 2.0 Link
Dolly 2023-03-24 Databricks MIT Link
Falcon 2023-05-23 TII Apache 2.0 Link
FastChat 2023-04-28 LMSYS Apache 2.0 Link
FLAN-T5 2022-12-06 Google Apache 2.0 Link
FLAN-UL2 2023-03-03 Google Apache 2.0 Link
GPT-J 2021-06-09 EleutherAI Apache 2.0 Link
GPT4All 2023-03-26 Nomic AI Varies Link
GPTNeo 2021-03-21 EleutherAI, Together Apache 2.0 Link
Guanaco 2023-05-23 UW NLP Noncommercial Link
Koala 2023-04-03 BAIR Noncommercial Link
LLaMA 2023-02-24 Meta Noncommercial Link
Llama 2 2023-07-18 Meta Custom (Commercial OK) Link
MPT 2023-05-05 MosaicML Apache 2.0 Link
OpenAssistant 2023-04-15 LAION Varies Link
OpenLLaMA 2023-04-28 OpenLM Research Apache 2.0 Link
OPT 2022-05-03 Meta NA Link
Orca 2023-06-05 Microsoft Noncommercial Link
Pythia 2023-02-13 EleutherAI, Together Apache 2.0 Link
RedPajama-INCITE 2023-05-05 Together Apache 2.0 Link
StableLM 2023-04-19 Stability AI CC BY-SA 4.0 Link
StableVicuna 2023-04-28 Stability AI Noncommercial Link
Vicuna 2023-03-30 UC Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, MBZUAI, UCSD Noncommercial Link
WizardLM 2023-05-26 WizardLM Noncommercial Link

Comparisons

Commercial LLM Comparison

Side-by-side comparisons of different commercial LLM offerings.

Bard ChatGPT Claude Cohere Jurassic Inflection-1
Bard Link Link Link Link Link
ChatGPT Link Link Link Link Link
Claude Link Link Link Link Link
Cohere Link Link Link Link Link
Jurassic Link Link Link Link Link
Inflection-1 Link Link Link Link Link

Open Source LLM Comparison

Side-by-side comparisons of open source LLM options.

Scroll right to see the full table.

Alpaca BLOOM BLOOMChat Cerebras-GPT Dolly Falcon FastChat FLAN-T5 FLAN-UL2 GPT-J GPT4All GPTNeo Guanaco Koala LLaMA Llama 2 MPT OpenAssistant OpenLLaMA OPT Orca Pythia RedPajama-INCITE StableLM StableVicuna Vicuna WizardLM
Alpaca Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
BLOOM Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
BLOOMChat Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
Cerebras-GPT Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
Dolly Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
Falcon Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
FastChat Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
FLAN-T5 Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
FLAN-UL2 Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
GPT-J Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
GPT4All Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
GPTNeo Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
Guanaco Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
Koala Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
LLaMA Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
Llama 2 Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
MPT Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
OpenAssistant Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
OpenLLaMA Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
OPT Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
Orca Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
Pythia Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
RedPajama-INCITE Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
StableLM Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
StableVicuna Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
Vicuna Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link
WizardLM Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link Link

By Industry

The most widely known LLMs are general-purpose, i.e. they can perform a variety of tasks across different topics and commercial industries. However, sometimes users and businesses may want an LLM trained on data from a specific industry, reducing the amount of prompting required for it to behave in an industry-relevant way and constraining its behavior. Also known as domain-specific LLMs, these language models may be easier to deploy to production for many businesses or serve as a better foundation for fine-tuning.

Coming Soon

LLMs for biomedical, healthcare, finance, academia, and eCommerce.

By Language

LLMs are often trained on massive web crawls of text from various languages. Hence, often they are multilingual by default. However, there have also been LLMs trained specifically for languages besides English.

Coming Soon

Libraries

In addition to APIs, a number of developer libraries and SDKs have been released for working with LLMs. You can find Sapling's curated list of LLM libraries here:



Frequently Asked Questions

As these systems are evolving rapidly, we do not feel comfortable passing judgement on which LLM is best. However, a combination of cloud vs. ability to self-host, pricing, and qualitative evaluation should be enough to prune the index down to a small number of possible options.

If you'd like to look over tables of numbers, Stanford mantains the HELM benchmark.

Contact us with a brief description of your use case if you'd like for us to make a snap assessment. Depending on your requirements, a smaller, custom language model may even be the best option.

Please see the question above on how to evaluate different LLMs. Some factors you'll likely wish to consider include (1) compute costs, (2) data security requirements, (3) whether a custom language model would work best, (4) latency requirements, and (5) internal expertise available to set up the deployment.

LLMs are now available for different languages (Chinese, English, etc.) as well as different industries (healthcare/biomedical, legal, software coding, financial services, and cybersecurity). We plan to release comparisons for different languages and industries soon; in the meantime, feel free to contact us regarding your specific need.

Training an LLM is expensive. Although libraries and scaffolding for training LLMs are being rapidly released, the process can still be finicky, especially if you do not have experience training NLP models. If you need guidance on getting started, it's more than likely you should instead be finetuning one of the existing commercial LLMs using their finetuning guides and/or finding a LLM that roughly matches your use case.