Interest in building an LLM frontend for KDE

[Loren Burkholder]

Howdy, everyone!

You are all undoubtedly aware of the buzz around LLMs for the past year. Of course, there are many opinions on LLMs, ranging from "AI is the future/endgame for web search or programming or even running your OS" to "AI should be avoided like the plague because it hallucinates and isn't fundamentally intelligent" to "AI is evil because it was trained on massive datasets that were scraped without permission and regurgitates that data without a license". I personally am of the opinion that while output from LLMs should be taken with a grain of salt and cross-examined against trustworthy sources, they can be quite useful for tasks like programming.

KDE obviously is not out to sell cloud services; that's why going to https://kde.org doesn't show you a banner "Special offer! Get 1 TB of cloud storage for $25 per month!" Therefore, I'm *not* here to talk about hosting a (paywalled) cloud LLM. However, I do think that it is worthwhile opening discussion about a KDE-built LLM frontend app for local, self-hosted, or third-party-hosted models.

>From a technical standpoint, such an app would be fairly easy to implement. It could rely on Ollama[0] (or llama.cpp[1], although llama.cpp isn't focused on a server mode) to host the actual LLM; either of those backends support a wide variety of hardware (including running on CPU; no fancy GPU required), as well as many open-source LLM models like Llama 2. Additionally, using Ollama could allow users to easily interact with remote Ollama instances, making this an appealing path for users who wished to offload LLM work to a home server or even offload from a laptop to a more powerful desktop.

>From an ideological standpoint, things get a little more nuanced. Does KDE condone or condemn the abstract concept of an LLM? What about actual models we have available (i.e. are there no models today that were trained in a way we view as morally OK)? Should we limit support to open models like Llama 2 or would we be OK with adding API support for proprietary models like GPT-4? Should we be joining the mainstream push to put AI into everything or should we stand apart and let Microsoft have its fun focusing on AI instead of potentially more useful features? I don't recall seeing any discussion about this before (at least not here), so I think those are all questions that should be fairly considered before development on a KDE LLM frontend begins.

I think it's also worth pointing out that while we can sit behind our screens and spout out our ideals about AI, there are many users who aren't really concerned about that and just like having a chatbot that responds in what at least appears to be an intelligent manner about whatever they ask it. I have personally made use of AI while programming to help me understand APIs, and I'm sure that other people here have also had positive experiences with AI and plan to continue using it.

I fully understand that by sending this email I will likely be setting off a firestorm of arguments about the morality of AI, but I'd like to remind everyone to (obviously) keep it civil. And for the record, if public opinion comes down in favor of building a client, I will happily assume the responsibility of kicking off and potentially maintaining development of said client.

Cheers,
Loren Burkholder

P.S. If development of such an app goes through, you can get internet points by adding support for Stable Diffusion and/or DALL-E :)

[0]: https://github.com/jmorganca/ollama
[1]: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp
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