Alternatives
Products that do what I built an on-device LLM based chatbot for iPhones does
I’ve been playing around with local LLMs for the past couple of months and decided to build something that can run on an iPhone. It’s a universal app built with SwiftUI and the excellent ggml library. The model is an SFT fine tuned and 4 bit quantised version of the RedPajama-INCITE-Chat-3B-v1 OSS LLM. It works reasonably well on recent-ish (~3 year old) iPhones, iPads and Macs. It was launched on the App Store yesterday[1] and Product Hunt today[2]. It seems to be reasonably ok at natural language interactions, but given its size, does pretty badly at coding and reasoning. Also, it…
- 1IM
Hi Hackers, Excited to share a macOS app I've been working on: https://recurse.chat/ for chatting with local AI. While it's amazing that you can run AI models locally quite easily these days (through llama.cpp / llamafile / ollama / llm CLI etc.), I missed feature complete chat interfaces. Tools like LMStudio are super powerful, but there's a learning curve to it. I'd like to hit a middleground of simplicity and customizability for advanced users. Here's what separates RecurseChat out from similar apps: - UX designed for you to use local AI as a daily driver.…
2024 · recurse.chat
- 2IB
I spent the last few days building out a nicer ChatGPT-like interface to use Mistral 7B and Llama 3 fully within a browser (no deps and installs). I’ve used the WebLLM project by MLC AI for a while to interact with LLMs in the browser when handling sensitive data but I found their UI quite lacking for serious use so I built a much better interface around WebLLM. I’ve been using it as a therapist and coach. And it’s wonderful knowing that my personal information never leaves my local computer. Should work on Desktop with Chrome or Edge. Other browsers are adding WebGPU support as well - see…
2024 · github.com
- 3IB
Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 4IB
Hi HN, I built this out of frustration of the evergrowing list of AI models and features to try and to fit my workflow. The visual approach clicks for me so i went with it, it provides more freedom and control of the outcome, because predictable results and increased productivity is what I’m after when using conversational AI. The app is packed with features, my most used are prompt library, voice input and text search, narration is useful too. The app is local-first and works right in the browser, no sign up needed and it's absolutely free to try. BYOAK – bring your own API Keys. Let me…
2024 · grafychat.com
- 5SO
We built SwiftAI, an open-source Swift library that lets you use Apple’s on-device LLMs when available (Apple opened access in June), and fall back to a cloud model when they aren’t available — all without duplicating code. SwiftAI gives you: - A single, model-agnostic API - An agent/tool loop - Strongly-typed structured outputs - Optional chat state Backstory: We started experimenting with Apple’s local models because they’re free (no API calls), private, and work offline. The problem: not all devices support them (older iPhones, Apple Intelligence disabled, low battery, etc.). That…
2025 · github.com
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- 7WL
Hello HN! I've been thinking about the idea of a LLM thats a clone of me - instead of generating replies to be a helpful assistant, it generates replies that are exactly like mine. The concept's appeared in fiction numerous times (the talking paintings in Harry Potter that mimic the person painted, the clones in The Prestige), and I think with LLMs, there might actually be a possibility of us doing something like this! I've just released a fork of the facebookresearch/llama-recipes which allows you to fine-tune a Llama model on your personal WhatsApp conversations. This adaptation can…
2023 · github.com
- 8IB
We show the potential of modern, embedded graph databases in the browser by demonstrating a fully in-browser chatbot that can perform Graph RAG using Kuzu (the graph database we're building) and WebLLM, a popular in-browser inference engine for LLMs. The post retrieves from the graph via a Text-to-Cypher pipeline that translates a user question into a Cypher query, and the LLM uses the retrieved results to synthesize a response. As LLMs get better, and WebGPU and Wasm64 become more widely adopted, we expect to be able to do more and more in the browser in combination with LLMs, so a lot of…
2025 · blog.kuzudb.com
- 9OS
Hey everyone, We have been building SecureAI Tools -- an open-source application layer for ChatGPT and ChatPDF-like AI tools. It works with locally running LLMs as well as with OpenAI-compatible APIs. For local LLMs, it supports Ollama which supports all the gguf/ggml models. Currently, it has two features: Chat-with-LLM, and Chat-with-PDFs. It is optimized for self-hosting use cases and comes with basic user management features. Here are some quick demos: * Chat with documents using OpenAI's GPT3.5 model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Br2D3G9O47s * Chat with documents…
2023 · github.com
- 10LA
A simple mobile web app inspired by Fuzzy-Search/realtime-bakllava that uses llama.cpp server backend with multimodal mode to describe and narrate what the phone camera sees. I built this thing in a few hours using a single ChatGPT thread to generate most things for me and iterate on this project. Here's the workflow: https://chat.openai.com/share/ea84ec69-5617-45e8-8772-ac2dcf...
2023 · github.com
- 11
- 12IB
I'm lost between ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini... which subscriptions to take? With Cursor and all these specific AI tools, I just wanted one simple chat app where I can use any model and pay only when I use it. Couldn't find one, so I built one. Pay only for what you use. Your prompts and docs, knowledge bases work with every model - no more copy-pasting between apps. Started as a personal project, but thought someone else might benefit from this too. https://prismharmony.com/chat What do you think?
2025 · prismharmony.com
- 13TF
I’d originally launched my app: Private LLM[1][2] on HN around 10 months ago, with a single RedPajama Chat 3B model. The app has come a long way since then. About a month ago, I added support for 4-bit OmniQuant quantized Mixtral 8x7B Instruct model, and it seems to outperform Q4 models at inference speed and Q8 models at text generation quality, while consuming only about 24GB of RAM[3] at 8k context length. The trick is: a) to use a better quantization algorithm and b) to use unquantized embeddings and the MoE gates (the overhead is quite small). Other notable features include many more…
2024
- 14CW
Hello HN! I was fed up switching between multiple UIs to ask GPT, Claude, etc… the same question and comparing the answers. So I built a way to ask multiple models the same question efficiently by having the LLM compare the responses and only show you new and valuable information from the 2nd model. This way you still get a fast response as normal from the 1st model, but also get any added value provided by the 2nd model. Initially I built my own UI to use this, but stumbled upon Open WebUI (formerly Ollama WebUI) which is fantastic, but is made more for local access to LLMs. So I talked to…
2025 · polychat.co
- 15IT
I trained the 65b model on my texts so I can talk to myself. It's pretty useless as an assistant, and will only do stuff you convince it to, but I guess it's technically uncensored? I'll leave it up for a bit if you want to chat with it. I posted this to Reddit and had several hundred people talking to it. Salient points from that discussion: LLAMA 1 65b Rank 128 5 epochs Batch size 1, 256 cutoff Trained in the Oobabooga suite using bitsandbytes 4-bit quantization for the lora Loss around 1.5 seems to give the most coherent results Trained on raw text dumps that is then parsed by a crappy…
2023 · airic.serveo.net
- 16AL
Lately I've felt exhausted due to the deluge of AI/GPT posts on hacker news, and have seen similar grumblings. I threw together this frontend that filters out anything with the phrases AI, LLM, GPT, or LLaMa for use until the hype dies down a bit. Before anyone asks, yes I did try to use ChatGPT to help, and while the code it provided was helpful, it needed some heavy bug-fixing. Edit: One other note I forgot to mention. The favicon is generated by Stable Diffusion, I asked it to generate an "Aritificial Intelligence Favicon", and then I added the red circle with line through it.
2023 · save-buffer.github.io
- 17
I made this experimental art project/game that's an LLM chat assistant, but where you're the AI. I wanted people to get a visceral sense of what it's like to answer the kinds of things that people prompt their chatbots day in and day out. If you're interested, I wrote up some more info on how I made it, including how the "user" prompts are generated with an eye for realism: https://bethechatbot.com/about Hope you enjoy it! I'd love to hear people's takeaways.
Jul 2026 · bethechatbot.com
- 18CA
Hey folks, we created a ChatGPT alternative for anyone to try out LLaMA models and benchmark responses across OpenAI's models and other open source models. Would love some feedback! No data is being used for retraining models.
2023 · chat.nbox.ai
- 19DO
Hey HN, I have been working on a side project for the last 3 months, built around LangchainJS and pgvector. It now supports ChatGPT, Llama, Claude, and Bison models, and the bot can integrate with WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord for now. I would really appreciate some feedback. Thanks! repo: https://github.com/n4ze3m/dialoqbase
2023
- 20
OmnyChat▲7Hey all, During Christmas and new year I was building this app day and night, I basically built it for my own use, I've got so much headache switching between tabs of different LLMs and chatbots, and other ai chat apps were missing some features that I really really wanted: - be able to chat with multiple models at once - be able to do debate with multiple models so thats why I built it, I launched it 2 days ago, 0 users so far, I really appreciate any feedbacks. I offer free plan with 20 message / day in some cheap models (I'm indie dev with no budget) and 2 plans that gives you higher…
12d ago · omny.chat
- 21MA
My puny version of ChatGPT. This was based on the excellent LLM lecture series by Andrej Karpathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY The main points of differentiation are that my version is token-based (tiktoken) with code to load up multiple text files as a trining set. Plus, it has a minimal server which is a drop-in replacement for the OpenAI REST API. So you can train the default tiny 15M parameter model, and use that in your projects instead of ChatGPT. I trained it on 20Mb of Project Gutenberg encyclopaedias, then fine-tuned it on 120 dad jokes, to get a Q: A:…
2023 · github.com
- 22GL
Hey everyone! I made a Mac app for exploring large language models. It’s fast, small, has a tiny memory footprint. It’s immutable by design with both immediate time travel and automatic versioning as foundational elements. The app is written in Swift and a bit of Rust for the tokenizer. I used SwiftUI for structure and animations and Cocoa for advanced behavior. All storage is SQLite and local-only. You can go through the database as needed and backup it as well. The app has support for variants, which is the `n` parameter in the OpenAI chat completion API—equivalent to the drafts feature in…
2023 · thellm.app
- 23
Around 3 months ago, we were thinking why none of the iPhone apps running an LLM are built as a full harness (as in inference + agentic loop + context management + tools + MCP servers and etc.). It became more interesting when we noticed even the new Siri is not fully on device (and not available in EU for that matter). Having built a few agentic products around a custom harness in the past, we thought this shouldn't be that hard. well, we underestimated how "dumb" a 4B model can be, especially when it comes to tool calling. :D We tried 8 different models and we settled on Qwen 3.5 4B and we…
19d ago · orvena.app
- 24MC
Hey everyone! Many of you might have come across the Mamba paper a few days ago, which introduced an LLM based on a state space model architecture. The Mamba architecture is quite useful as its complexity scales subquadratically with input length and is therefore way more efficient than transformer models: https://github.com/state-spaces/mamba I got really excited about the paper, so I decided to fine-tune the model on a chat dataset. It turns that this actually worked quite well! The model is quite suitable for casual chatting, which honestly surprised me given that it…
2023 · github.com
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