Private, No-Code Alternatives to ChatGPT on Your Desktop

Angelina Yang
2 min readMay 3, 2024
  • Are you concerned with privacy when using AI chatbots like ChatGPT?
  • Do you want to experiment with different open source language models conveniently just like the ChatGPT UI?

Today, we’ll introduce some great desktop applications that allow you to run models locally on your computer with no coding required.

Chatbox

Recently, one of the most popular options is Chatbox. This free app lets you use open source language models like Google’s Gemma right on your desktop. The interface is clean and user-friendly, with a sidebar for selecting models, adjusting settings like temperature, creating custom prompts, and more.

Once you’ve downloaded a model, you can chat with it just like ChatGPT.

Benefits

The key advantages of desktop apps like these are privacy, since your data never leaves your local machine, and flexibility to use a variety of models beyond what’s offered by services like OpenAI. They make it easy to experiment with different open source AIs without any coding.

Of course, these local tools aren’t a complete replacement for tools like ChatGPT, which has complex model pipelines behind the scene. But for those prioritizing privacy or just wanting to tinker…

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