Free Open-Source Artificial Intelligence

Depends on your hardware and how far you're willing to go. For serious development I think you need at least 12-16 GB of VRAM, but there's still some things you can do with ~8. If you just have a cpu, you can still test some models but generation will be slow.

I'd recommend trying out the oogabooga webui. This should work with quite a few models on hugging face. Hopefully I don't get in trouble for recommending a subreddit but r/localllama has a lot of other great resources and us a very active community. They're doing exactly what you want.

As far as your other questions...

1. Accessing it on your phone is going to be tricky. You would most likely want to host it somewhere but I'm not sure how easy that is for someone without a bit of software background. Maybe there is a good service for this, huggingface might offer something.

2. Cross thread referencing is an interesting idea. I think you would need to create a log store of all your conversations and then embed those into a a vector store (like milvus or weaviate or qdrant). This is a little tricky since you have to decide how to chunk your conversations, but it is doable. The next step is somewhat open ended. You could always query your vector store with any questions that you are already sending your model, and then pass any hits to the model along with your original question. Alternatively, you could tell the model to check for other conversations and trigger a function call to do this on command. A good starting point might be this example, which makes references to a hardware manual in a Q&A style chatbot.

3. Using an LLM with stable diffusion: not especially sure what you are hoping to get out of this. Maybe to reduce boilerplate prompt writing? But yes you can finetune a model to handle this and then have the model execute a function that calls stable diffusion and returns the results. I am pretty sure langchain provides a framework for this. Langchain is almost certainly a tool you will want to become familiar with.

You should download Llama 2 from Meta, as that is the best open source LLM right now. It comes in 7B,13B,and 70B sizes, as well as chat versions of those sizes. You'll need a good computer to run them, but if you're already running Stable Diffusion you should be fine.

I think Llama 2 has a python API, so you should be able to use it as prompt for SD, as long as it also has a python API.

Llama 2 actually has a smaller context length than chatGPT (it will remember less of the conversation), but you can use hacks like using a separate prompt to summarise the conversation, then another one to find the relevant parts of it in relation to your actual prompt, and then finally use that selected part of the conversation history in your prompt.