  Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved human-level performance
on a range of professional and academic benchmarks. The accessibility of these
models has lagged behind their performance. State-of-the-art LLMs require
costly infrastructure; are only accessible via rate-limited, geo-locked, and
censored web interfaces; and lack publicly available code and technical
reports. In this paper, we tell the story of GPT4All, a popular open source
repository that aims to democratize access to LLMs. We outline the technical
details of the original GPT4All model family, as well as the evolution of the
GPT4All project from a single model into a fully fledged open source ecosystem.
It is our hope that this paper acts as both a technical overview of the
original GPT4All models as well as a case study on the subsequent growth of the
GPT4All open source ecosystem.
