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Comment by Arcuru | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of being spammy, I wrote a simple Matrix bot that replicates the entirety of their currently announced featureset, but also supports any other model too, that you can access from a normal Matrix client.

Stop re-building chat clients, I already have one!

Ideally they would just run their own chatbot on different existing chat platforms that you could verify your API key with, but with my project you can at least run that chatbot yourself.

[0] - https://github.com/arcuru/chaz

[1] - https://jackson.dev/post/chaz/ (Blog Post)

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Chat clients don't support "forking" discussions, interrupting output, etc.

You can implement a decent "forking" feature pretty easily in Matrix at least, by using Threads. My bot does not support that at the moment though.

Interrupting output (or streaming responses in general) won't work in a non-custom chat client, but I don't tend to use that anyways.

Does it also support saving a specific chat and reusing it later on?

All the chats are just Matrix rooms, so...yes. Just open a different Matrix room for a different chat.

Oo how does it compared to matrix chatGPT bot (supports Claude despite its name)? https://github.com/matrixgpt/matrix-chatgpt-bot

Disclaimer: I’m a small contributor to that repo

Chaz is less mature, probably buggier, more difficult to setup, configured with yaml instead of Environment Variables (why would they do that?), and written in Rust. It also uses AIChat on the backend which isn't necessarily restricted to OpenAI compatible APIs.

I also can't tell if matrix-chatgpt-bot supports sending images, but Chaz does.

Chaz supports switching the model used at any time as well, including in the middle of the chat. So you can setup many separate models and switch between them as necessary for different rooms.

Oo being able to change models sounds great! The environment thing is pretty popular technique for matrix bridges since majority of them are docker based. You usually set environment variables to the docker compose.

Can your bot be run on mobile?

Can Claude?

Locally-run LLMs are very cool, but I think we have some way to go for smartphone performance to make datacenter-run (or beefy personal workstation for privacy!) ones obsolete.

Until then, I also really like the idea of making chatbots accessible via instant messengers. I find myself using the one in WhatsApp quite a lot these days, just because it's conveniently available on multiple platforms (with my history synchronized) and I can tag it in when chatting with friends. It also works on flights with zero-rated messaging.

Using Poe.com and their mobile apps it can.

The LLM there runs on your phone?

No, Poe uses APIs to the foundation model providers running inference in the cloud.

You can access it via your normal Matrix client, like the Element app for iOS or Android.

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