nowfound

Commerce · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I've built a locally running Perplexity clone

The video demo runs a 7b Model on a normal gaming GPU. I think it already works quite well (accounting for the limited hardware power). :)

LLocalSearch is a free, open-source search aggregator that runs locally on consumer gaming hardware. It uses a 7-billion parameter language model to function as a Perplexity alternative, aggregating search results… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I've built a locally running Perplexity clone launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    We built a search engine interface on top of OpenAI GPT 3.5 and Microsoft Bing that summarizes and cites top search results in response to natural language questions. By using search results, the AI is able to reference recent news and provide citations for specific facts. Our interface offers concise answers, without having to click through links, scroll past irrelevant content, or read ads. No login is required; no personal data is collected. We believe in the power of combining the intuitive UI of web search with the intelligence of large language models. The search engine does indexing…

    2025 · perplexity.ai · its alternatives →

  2. 2WM

    Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…

    2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    I found that duplicating a specific block of 7 middle layers in Qwen2-72B, without modifying any weights, improved performance across all Open LLM Leaderboard benchmarks and took #1. As of 2026, the top 4 models on that leaderboard are still descendants. The weird finding: single-layer duplication does nothing. Too few layers, nothing. Too many, it gets worse. Only circuit-sized blocks of ~7 layers work. This suggests pretraining carves out discrete functional circuits in the layer stack that only work when preserved whole. The whole thing was developed on 2x RTX 4090s in my basement. I'm…

    Mar 2026 · dnhkng.github.io · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hi HN! I'm just sharing a project I've been working on during the LLM Efficiency Challenge - you can now finetune Llama with QLoRA 5x faster than Huggingface's original implementation on your own local GPU. Some highlights: 1. Manual autograd engine - hand derived backprop steps. 2. QLoRA / LoRA 80% faster, 50% less memory. 3. All kernels written in OpenAI's Triton language. 4. 0% loss in accuracy - no approximation methods - all exact. 5. No change of hardware necessary. Supports NVIDIA GPUs since 2018+. CUDA 7.5+. 6. Flash Attention support via Xformers. 7. Supports 4bit and 16bit…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Find the local LLM that actually runs and performs best on your hardware. Ranked by real, recency-aware benchmarks, not parameter count. One command, run it instantly. - Andyyyy64/whichllm

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hi everyone, I'm kinda involved in some retrogaming and with some experiments I ran into the following question: "It would be possible to run transformer models bypassing the cpu/ram, connecting the gpu to the nvme?" This is the result of that question itself and some weekend vibecoding (it has the linked library repository in the readme as well), it seems to work, even on consumer gpus, it should work better on professional ones tho

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Search and discovery with AI

    2024 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    A simple calculator that estimates how many concurrent requests your GPU can handle for a given LLM, with shareable results.

    2025 · selfhostllm.org · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hi HN, I’m Joe. My friends Matthew, Jake and I are building Luminal (https://luminalai.com/), a GPU compiler for automatically generating fast GPU kernels for AI models. It uses search-based compilation to achieve high performance. We take high level model code, like you'd have in PyTorch, and generate very fast GPU code. We do that without using LLMs or AI - rather, we pose it as a search problem. Our compiler builds a search space, generates millions of possible kernels, and then searches through it to minimize runtime. You can try out a demo in `demos/matmul` on mac to…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    NobodyWho▲106

    Hey, Hello, we are the team behind NobodyWho; an open-source plugin that embeds large language models functionality inside Unity and Godot games - completely locally and offline. We try to make it as easy and user friendly as possible to use our plugin, so feel free to create an issue on our GitHub if you have any inconveniences - and we will try to improve it! So why might this interest you: - Written in Rust with llama.cpp bindings and optional GPU back-ends (Vulkan / Metal) for fast inference. - Drop-in nodes / components: add a model asset and a chat or embedding node and get a…

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey Folks! I've been building an open source benchmark for measuring local LLM performance on your own hardware. The benchmarking tool is a CLI written on top of Llamafile to allow for portability across different hardware setups and operating systems. The website is a database of results from the benchmark, allowing you to explore the performance of different models and hardware configurations. Please give it a try! Any feedback and contribution is much appreciated. I'd love for this to serve as a helpful resource for the local AI community. For more check out: - Website:…

    2025 · localscore.ai · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    We've built InferX, a specialized runtime environment that fundamentally changes how LLMs are served. The core problem we solve is the latency bottleneck in AI inference, especially with large models. Current systems waste resources or suffer from painfully slow cold starts. InferX's AI-native architecture, with its "snapshot" technology, enables: * *Sub-2s cold starts:* Spin up models instantly. * *High density:* Serve more LLMs on the same GPUs. * *Optimal efficiency:* Maximize GPU utilization. This isn't just another API; it's a new execution layer designed from the ground up for the…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hey HN, I've been using LLM-powered search engines like Perplexity a lot recently for question answering but had two major qualms: 1. Too much text: I'm already tired of wading through LLM-generated meaningless filler when debugging my code. The last thing I need is more of it when I'm just trying to find a simple answer. 2. The Reddit factor: I've realized that half my search queries have "Reddit" appended to them, especially for experiential questions or recommendations. This led to Just the Answer. Just the Answer uses GPT-4o to generate a unique search query for each message that is…

    2024 · justtheanswer.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  14. 14CI

    One of the most frequent questions one faces while running LLMs locally is: I have xx RAM and yy GPU, Can I run zz LLM model ? I have vibe coded a simple application to help you with just that. Update: A lot of great feedback for me to improve the app. Thank you all.

    2025 · can-i-run-this-llm-blue.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Calculate token/s & GPU memory requirement for any LLM. Supports llama.cpp/ggml/bnb/QLoRA quantization - RahulSChand/gpu_poor

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    hey hn, I built an open-source Perplexity clone that can run local LLMs and cloud LLMs. It's fully self-hostable through Docker and uses ollama to support local LLMs. The demo video in the repository shows me running it locally with llama3 on my M1 Macbook Pro. I'm open to any suggestions or feedback, thanks!

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hi HN! I'm the author of mere.run a local first inference runtime built around an installable CLI. I believe that whenever possible we should use the stuff we already own (like our Mac laptops, decent machines gathering dust, our gaming PC) and the limited electrical power we have easy access to, like the socket in the wall next to most of us. We shouldn't have to send our data to the cloud hoping some T&C will prevent it from being used in a way that we'd regret. Most of the local AI solutions are technical, involved, and land a curious body in some package hell. People are optimizing for…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi there, looking for feedback on my new project "Featherless.AI" The idea is to allow users to run all the models on hugging face instantly. Via the OpenAI API compatible endpoint. Why? Because its a real chore to download models and spin up GPUs, especially if you want to test multiple models. Not to mention GPUs cost multiple dollars an hour to rent. And if we want more people to use open source AI, we got to make it easier for them to try and play with all of them. So what if instead of spinning up dedicated GPUs per model (which is what every provider is doing) We can startup a LLM…

    2024 · featherless.ai · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Built a simple web app that tells you which open-source LLMs will work on your hardware. It auto-detects your specs, shows compatible models from Hugging Face, gives realistic performance estimates (tokens/sec), and recommends quantization settings. You can also manually input specs to see "what if I upgraded my RAM?" Made this after wasting time downloading giant models only to find they crawled on my hardware. Hope it saves you some frustration!

    2025 · caniusellm.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Minimal, readable LLM post-training experiments on one 8GB GPU. Measures forgetting, seed variance, and RL emergence. - pochenai/nano-llm-posttraining

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Input a SMILES string (or pick one molecule from the examples) and it returns up to 100k molecules closest in 3-D shape or electrostatic similarity – from 10+ billion scale databases — typically in under 5-10 s. *Why it might interest HN* * Entire index lives on disk — no GPU at query-time, less than ~10 GB RAM total. * Built from scratch (no FAISS index / Milvus / Pinecone). * Index-build cost: one Nvidia T4 (~ 300USD) for one 5.5B database. * Open to anyone, predict ADMET, export results as CSV/SDF. Full write-up & benchmarks (DUD-E, LIT-PCBA, SVS) in the pre-print:…

    2025 · cheese-new.deepmedchem.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    The Open-Source Alternative to Perplexity

    2025 · its alternatives →

  23. 23RC

    Hello HN! We're building a caching solution for LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude). By combining cutting-edge approaches, such as edge computing, prompt compression, vectorization, and others - it can reduce your AI bills by up to 10x and significantly lower response times. Key Features: - cost efficiency: our system stores frequent queries, reducing the number of upstream (paid) API calls - fast responses: with various nodes globally, we reduce latency by serving data from the nearest location - scalability: designed to handle increasing loads and data sizes without degrading performance. The cache…

    2024 · edgematic.dev · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Search online with the power of AI. Try now!

    2024 · omniplex.ai · its alternatives →

Also compare

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →