enricoros
commented
6 months ago It's a great request, thanks for asking @WillSmithTE - it's been mostly myself and friends on this project, and it has been developed in true opensource fashion (sharing, open, welcoming contributions, open roadmap, participatory development, etc.).
Big-AGI introduces features ahead of time over and over, such as Beam last month, or Calls (before anyone), and a lot of other usability and UX smarts - which we care about. Over time many other projects will have them too. (try BEAM now, nobody has copied it yet to its full power!!) Btw: I have lots of AI experience as product manager in the AI space since 2018, plus AI development experience from custom models to UIs (e.g. https://www.soulreplica.com/brodown, 2020).
Big-AGI is not a clone and does not have the 'familiar' ChatGPT interface. I personally like innovative, novel, different products that feel magical to use. There are plenty of ChatGPT Clones and a large audience the loves that, but we want to be different. The principles are around Big-AGI are to minimize friction, have the best UX, help people the most and meet them where they are, and many more.
The roadmap is really exciting and I really wish I had more people helping!! The project did not get blessed with 'hype' status and it does not attract developers apparently 🤷 : the quality bar is HIGH (as you can see by using it), the code is broad (400+ files), and it's less fun to hack on than starting from scratch a weekend AI project. So the fun of development falls on me most of the time, and this doesn't scale as the feature surface keeps broadening.
The website follows a SaaS footprint, but there's nothing to pay 😃 - the code is truly open, and the dev model is opensource. Anyone can take it, deploy it, develop it, and I know of many internal deployments of big-AGI as it's a great project for one's/a company's internal AI needs.
WillSmithTE
dandv
Why I want to understand more about the "why" and the creators of this project. It looks like a really awesome and significant effort, and I would like to know more about the motivations and intent behind it.
Thanks to the licence, it seems to be truly open source. I would just like to get clarification somewhere about if this is the end goal of the project.
There are many AI quickstart style repos, and it's hard to quickly differentiate which are e.g. startup/VC funded, large company backed, going to be monetised soon, etc. The website feels like a SaaS, but there's no pricing or other info that makes it seem that way.
Description Some short "about us" or "about me" in either the website or the repo would be helpful.