What is weird is how competitive the open-source models are to the closed ones. For instance, PaLM-2 Bison is below multiple 12B models[0], despite it being plausibly much bigger[1]. The gap with GPT-4 is not that big; the best open-source model on the leaderboard beats it 30% of the time.
That said, the advancements in models like Orca and the "Textbooks are all you need" paper are noteworthy (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.02707.pdf, https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644). I'm optimistic about what future smaller models could achieve.
I am writing a new book Safe For Humans AI in which I am constraining myself to using open models that can be run on a high end PC or a leased GPU server. Yesterday I was exploring what I could do with T5-flan-XXL, and it is useful, but not as effective tool as the closed OpenAI models. I will do the same with Orca this week.
Especially for LangChain, I recommend using ≥33B models like Guanaco or WizardLM. Guanaco-65B honestly feels on-par with ChatGPT-3.5. (To be clear, there is a large gap with GPT-4 though.) It is a costly test, although GPTQ (for instance on exllama) help make it affordable.
I haven’t tried Orca since they haven’t released the weights yet, but it doesn’t seem like they have a 33B version.
Oh it is though. I've tried several OS models and nothing comes even close to GPT-4. Turns out ClosedAI has a moat after all.
Wish there was a bookmark/remind-me function so I could come back in 8 months' time and see how close I was.