The key is passed (see https://github.com/ShipBit/slickgpt/blob/main/src/lib/ChatIn...) to a Vercel edge function (see https://github.com/ShipBit/slickgpt/blob/main/src/routes/api...) that does the actual call to the OpenAI API. This function is stateless and doesn't store anything. I also put it in your localStorage using a store (see https://github.com/ShipBit/slickgpt/blob/main/src/misc/store...) so that you don't have to enter it over and over again.
As for the "what is this trying to solve" - read our documentation in the GitHub repo over at https://github.com/ShipBit/slickgpt.
From their Github Readme:
SlickGPT allows you to run your own local ChatGPT instance, host it yourself or just use our instance if you like. Users bring their own OpenAI API keys. SlickGPT offers them a very fancy user interface with a rich feature set like managing a local chat history (in the localStorage), a userless "Share" function for chats, a prominent context editor, and token cost calculation and distribution.
I find it interesting that so many projects claim to be "run your own ChatGPT", when they're in fact "run your own web UI". Are people really so ignorant of how this works that they're equating these concepts, or believing that the web UI is anything more than a razor thin veneer?
I guess maybe people use ChatGPT to refer to the interface, and GPT-N to refer to the models, but that's not very accurate given the amount of tuning, it's much more accurate to say that ChatGPT is a productised GPT instance, with a web UI.
> We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way
It really seems that GPT-3/3.5/4/etc are the generic models, and that ChatGPT is the fine tuning, a safety layer, and so on. This is also why ChatGPT and Bing don't provide the same or even remotely equivalent answers despite both running on GPT-4.
This one doesn’t appear to use a custom prompt, so I’m guessing it doesn’t perform as well as ChatGPT, but it does look like it passes message history.
Lot of others posted are other models that people could use.
I could easily see a wave of small startups that are just a few inputs and the context needed to generate documents people currently write by hand. Like subpoenas, doctors letters to insurance companies, etc. You can stand one up with a bit of industry knowledge and a couple 100 LOC.
Perhaps, but also there is a huge incentive to blur that line, obviously from the developers of these UIs, but also from the people at media outlets covering them. If they told the truth, it wouldn't be as big of a story. And I'm just waiting for the "7 year old makes their own GPT" story. For a long time now, the overwhelming majority of tech journalism has been just uncritically rephrasing press releases.
So this seems a bit paranoid.
Good thing this is open source!