Vicuna-13B is an open-source chatbot developed by fine-tuning a language model called LLaMA using user-shared conversations from ShareGPT.
It performs similarly to popular chatbots like OpenAI‘s ChatGPT and Google Bard, but at a lower cost of about $300.
It outperforms other models like LLaMA and Stanford Alpaca in most cases.
Vicuna‘s training and serving code are publicly available and can be tested through an online demo.
It was trained using 70,000 user-shared conversations and optimized to handle long conversations and minimize costs.
Evaluating chatbots is challenging due to their complex language understanding, reasoning, and context awareness.
The creators used GPT-4, another advanced language model, to evaluate Vicuna and found it performed competitively against popular chatbots.
Despite its impressive performance, Vicuna still has limitations, such as struggling with reasoning or math tasks, and may not always provide accurate or safe responses.
The developers acknowledge that creating a standardized evaluation system for chatbots remains an open research question.
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