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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to SmolCopilot – 360M LLM writing assistant in the browser

Hey! I've been really intrigued about small, on device models recently. This project was to explore that a small base model running in the browser as a Co Pilot-like writing assistant. You can check out the demo here: smol-complete.vercel.app. Smal, on device models have a lot of advantages with low latency, cost, privacy (a big one), and being task specific. The demo will definitely repeat itself and hallucinate sometimes, but let me know what you think!

SmolCopilot is a writing assistant powered by a 360M language model that runs directly in the browser. It provides real-time writing suggestions with low latency while keeping data private on the user's device. The… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. SmolCopilot – 360M LLM writing assistant in the browser launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Branchable computing by using a portable, lightweight, self-contained virtual machine - smol-machines/smolvm

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    How small can a language model be while still doing something useful? I wanted to find out, and had some spare time over the holidays. Z80-μLM is a character-level language model with 2-bit quantized weights ({-2,-1,0,+1}) that runs on a Z80 with 64KB RAM. The entire thing: inference, weights, chat UI, it all fits in a 40KB .COM file that you can run in a CP/M emulator and hopefully even real hardware! It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations…

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    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 · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    SmolVLA▲139

    Powerful robotics VLA that runs on consumer hardware

    2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hi HN - Marcello and Vaibhav here. We built smolmodels to experiment with using LLMs for ML development. It's a fully open-source library that generates complete model training and inference code from natural language descriptions. It combines graph search with LLM code generation to find a model that gives as good predictions as possible. The core idea is that LLMs are overkill for a lot of predictive tasks. Smolmodels automates the trial-and-error process of finding the right model architecture and training approach, letting you build small, specialised models. You can either provide your…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hey everyone, Really excited to share what I've been working on. Rapidpages is a prompt-first online IDE, think midjourney for front-end developers. I've been working on this for a while and it's great to see some interest from companies like Vercel in this space. All you need for self-hosting is an OpenAI key and a GitHub oauth app. Simply clone the repo and play with it. It's also available on the cloud at www.rapidpages.io Please give it a try and let me know if you have any feedback, and if you like what I'm doing with Rapidpages, please give it a star on GitHub. Thanks!

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    SmolVLM2▲206

    Smallest Video LM Ever from HuggingFace

    2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Elephas▲280

    Personal AI writing assistant for Mac, iPhone and iPad

    2023 · elephas.app · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hey, Jared Palmer (creator of this playground) here. Really excited to ship this. I’ve been building this over the past few weeks to compare LLMs from different providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, etc. At Vercel, I manage our Frameworks division (including Next.js, Svelte, and Turbo) and wanted to also dogfood some of the latest features in a slightly larger application. This playground takes a lot of inspiration from https://nat.dev and is built on Tailwind, ui.shadcn.com, and some upcoming Vercel products we’re announcing soon. We’re going to continue adding models to…

    2023 · play.vercel.ai · its alternatives →

  10. 10TL
  11. 11

    Tiny AI-generated sites for your ginormous ideas

    2024 · messenger.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Your journal on the small net

    2021 · smol.pub · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    A blog written by hand

    Jun 2026 · handwritten.danieljanus.pl · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Build your own high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA - a smaller version of vLLM - jmaczan/tiny-vllm

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hey HN! We’re Kevin and Steve. We’re building PromptTools (https://github.com/hegelai/prompttools): open-source, self-hostable tools for experimenting with, testing, and evaluating LLMs, vector databases, and prompts. Evaluating prompts, LLMs, and vector databases is a painful, time-consuming but necessary part of the product engineering process. Our tools allow engineers to do this in a lot less time. By “evaluating” we mean checking the quality of a model's response for a given use case, which is a combination of testing and benchmarking. As examples: - For generated…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16SP
  17. 17

    Optimize Performance, Cost, Speed & Carbon for each prompt

    Nov 2025 · modelpilot.co · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Auto-layer your text on random yet (mostly) relevant photos.

    2021 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hey HN OpenCopilot is an OSS framework which helps devs to build open-source AI Copilots that actually work and embed into their product with ease. Why another LLM framework? Twitter is full of impressive LLM applications but once you peel off the curtains it’s clear that they are just demos. The reason being because building an AI Copilot that goes beyond a Twitter demo can be complex, time-consuming and unreliable. Our team has been in the AI space since 2018 and built numerous LLM apps & copilots. While doing that, we got approached by many startups saying they’d also like to build a…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    So this weekend I and a friend of mine (@ronitrajfr) created a minimalist writing editor. It's ui is clean, beautiful and distraction free, it also has a vim mode and everything stays on your computer no authentication is required to write your thoughts and all we wanted an application where we just start typing with no BS and that's what we made. and did I tell ya that it's open source as well lmk your thoughts and feedback!!

    Dec 2025 · betterwrite.ronitt.xyz · its alternatives →

  21. 21LA

    Gun.io connects companies with elite freelance software developers. Vetted engineers, automated compliance, and guaranteed delivery for high-stakes projects.

    2011 · gun.io · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Powerful browser-based AI models for a wide array of tasks

    2023 · tinyllms.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Today we’re releasing a full AI app builder in Srcbook. We released our TypeScript notebook a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41291700) and the response was encouraging, but we kept hearing that people wanted to build interactive apps. Today we are releasing just that. You can think of it as an open-source and local version of vercel’s v0. We actually think of it as something in between an IDE and that, because we believe the code matters and don’t shy away from that: you can view and edit the code in a full editor, but prompt your way forward if that's…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Check out this impressive project that enables running LLMs entirely in the browser using WebGPU. Key features: - Zero token costs, no cloud infrastructure required - Complete data privacy through local processing - Simple 3-line code integration - Built on MLC and Transformer.js The benchmarks show smaller models can effectively handle many common tasks. Currently the project roadmap includes: - No-code AI pipeline builder - Browser-based RAG for document chat - Analytics/logging - Model fine-tuning interface

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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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 →