this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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Is there a "good-ish" AI chatbot? I uninstalled chatgpt and started using claude over the weekend 🤡
I don't use it that much, maybe a couple of questions a week and some help understanding Japanese grammar
check huggingface, it's got all the open models. inference is pay as you go, though most models are insanely cheap
Depends on your definition, Anthropic has been the somewhat less evil on the scene, doing a lot of research to actually understand what they're building instead of just making bold claims whenever they launch a new model, but it's still relative to huge AI companies. The more ethical choice would be local models, again depending on what you see as the ethical issues of AI
Depends on your definition of "good-ish". Do you mean:
Running one locally on your own hardware would likely reach "good-ish" with some sacrifices against performance/accuracy (unless you've got a lot of expensive hardware to run very large models). As far as ethical origins, there are few small models trained on public domain/nonstolen content, but their functions are far more limited.
I mean good-ish in the lesser-evil type of thing. I don't expect any of those to be 100% ethical but there are some that are a lot worse than others
I don't really have a computer capable of running a local AI. I have an i3 laptop from around 6 years ago with 12gb of RAM and integrated graphics
Ethics are subjective. "Good-ish" to you may mean you're fine if its trained on copyrighted works as long as it wasn't done with electricity from diesel generators belching exhaust into the local Memphis atmosphere (I'm looking at you Grok). Llama doesn't do the diesel generator thing, but its a product of Facebook corporation. So is that "good-ish" to you or not? I don't know. That's up to you.
It may not be fast, but your i3 laptop with 12GB of system RAM can absolutely run a local LLM. This is where that "performance/accuracy" question I raised comes in. It won't be very fast, and you won't be able to run the most common large models like GPT-5 etc. However, if your needs are light, light models exist. Give this a read
I'm quite happy with Mistrals LeChat. I have not done much research on Mistral but from the headlines I read they don't seem like bad guys.
The general quality of the answers is slightly worse than chat gpt (IMO). But I like some features like agents and document libraries in the free tier
If you have a decent GPU, Ollama lets you run them on your own hardware
If you can't validate the answers it gives, I would recommend not using it. It could be giving you complete nonsense in Japanese and you'll have no way to know until years later someone looks at you funny when you say something and you explain "I learned Japanese from chatgpt".
If by "good" you mean one that more reliably answers your questions correctly, then no. That's not really what these systems are good at. They're fully capable of giving a solid, accurate answer, but you can simply never trust it to be correct. They're great for chit-chat and bouncing around ideas if you're into that, but it's not an oracle.
When it comes to translating languages, that's one of the few things LLMs are actually somewhat decent at, and I don't think there's much difference between them in that regard.
No, I mean good in the sense of less evil. I don't ask any question to a bot where I need complete accuracy