AI for everyone: 5 free and open-source tools. No fees, No platform limitations
Today there are many open-source projects and models (Stable Diffusion, HuggingFace..) which offer an alternative to the commercial solutions ( openAI…), and are accessible to everyone.
These open-source projects work also in most cases offline and do not require an internet connection like ChatGPT.
For better privacy, you can even use them on your own computer to assist you with your tasks and without paying monthly fees. In this case the limitation ist that you need a relatively powerful computer depending on the AI model and type of output you want to generate.
Butl the great thing about these AI solutions, is that you will be able to generate different outputs by only describing what you want in text, for free and without platform limitations:
- 1. Generate and modify Images ( from text -> to Image)
- 2. Generate Music (from text -> to Music)
- 3. Generate Scripts, Chat, Q&A… ( from text -> to text)
- 4. Image recognition ( from Image -> to text)
- 5. Generate Videos ( from text -> to video)
I made some short videos, how you can use those tools partly on your laptop.
1). Generate and modify images ( Text -> Image)
Open-source solution: Stable Diffusion
https://github.com/Stability-AI/stablediffusion
try it under: https://stablediffusionweb.com
2). Generate you own Music ( Text -> Music)
Open-source solution: AudioCraft library ( Facebook Research)
3). Generate Scripts, Chat, Q&A.. ( Text -> Text)
Open-source solution: Ollama + AI models
then download the models you need:
example: orca-mini , Lllama3, phi3
4). Image Recognition ( Image -> Text)
Open-source solution: Llava model (use it with Ollama):
https://ollama.com/library/llava
for example ingredients or approximative calories count for a cooking recipe only from uploading the Image of the recipe.
5). Generate Videos ( Text -> Video)
Open-source solution: Stable Video Diffusion
https://github.com/Stability-AI/generative-models
finally
One thing to keep in mind is that although the AI potential is high, the technology is still in its early phase. The quality of the outputs are in a lot of cases not yet there, in some cases totally wrong and not useful.
You need in most cases a lot of iterations and experiments with different open-source models and prompts to get the best results. If you have a technical Background, you can further train the model , to get better results.
**Disclaimer** Open-source and free software are always written with a disclaimer of liability and warranty. ***Please check you self the terms of usage before installing and using any software on your laptop***.
